Designed by rellam, Casa ID y Taller Grau is a house and studio in rural Galicia built to be taken apart: clad in cork, assembled from removable components and raised on steel posts above ground.
The countryside west of Santiago de Compostela is a patchwork of small holdings, chestnut woodland and villages strung along the valley edges above the river Tambre. Rural building here has long been modest and practical: stone farmhouses, timber sheds and the hórreos, granaries lifted clear of the damp on stone piers. Suevos, in the municipality of Ames, is one of these villages, a few hundred metres up from the river.
On a meadow at the edge of the valley, ringed by chestnut and bare birch, two small gabled buildings stand a short walk apart. One is a house and the other is a studio, both for Irene Grau. The site looks open and generous, but the soil beneath it is soft to a considerable depth. According to the architects, rellam: “The astounding scenery conceals a secret: the ground offers no resistance in the first 6 to 9 metres.”
They describe the buildings as “the result of a long process of reduction”, the first of which being the ground. Instead of digging down to find firm footing, both buildings sit on slender metal posts, cross-braced and painted the same pale green as the window frames. The posts went in without heavy machinery, and the meadow grass runs straight underneath the timber decks. “Lightness, then, is the main driver of this work,” rellam shares.
The same logic governs the envelope. Both buildings are clad in cork panels, left raw, with the joints between boards still faintly legible across the gables. Expanded cork is made by heating granules of cork oak bark until they bind in their own resin, coming from the neighbouring Portugal. Standing-seam, gabled roof forms speak to a classic house shape.
Critically, every component can be taken apart again. And apart from the metal posts, all of the materials came from Galicia or just across the border in Portugal. Each component was selected for its low carbon footprint.
Inside the house, pale plywood lines the walls and the pitched ceiling. A freestanding joinery block divides the single room. The kitchen runs along one wall, with a speckled stone benchtop and splashback. On the other side of the block, tatami mats and a low table make a working corner by the full-width glazing, which faces the meadow and the treeline.
The project took five years, from 2020 to 2025, and the two buildings total 102 square metres. The architects position the buildings within the agricultural vernacular around them while pushing toward what they call “an environmentally responsive architecture”. Their aim, as they frame it, is to rethink how architecture defines its own context. On this site, the ground set the terms: a building had to be light enough to stand on posts, simple enough to assemble and made of materials from within the region.
Casa ID y Taller Grau is a pair of small, demountable buildings for a soft Galician valley floor, built light enough that the meadow still grows beneath them.
Project credits
Project: Casa ID y Taller Grau
Location: Suevos, Ames, A Coruña, Spain
Completed: 2025 (design and construction 2020–2025)
Architects: rellam – Andrea Gimeno, Lluis J. Liñán, Xevi Lluch
Quantity surveyor: Melchor Nogueira
Consultant: TAK Estructuras – Iván López
Builder: Emedous – Marcos Romero
Floor area: 102 square metres
Photography: Luis Díaz Díaz
