In The Frame

A weekend retreat in Chile’s Casablanca Valley wine region is the perfect viewfinder.

Architects revel in the challenge of maximising potential, of transforming a project that may feel small and constrained or be on a difficult site into a striking piece of architecture. Nowhere is this truer than in this weekend house in Chile by local architecture firm Alvano y Riquelme.

When a couple of media professionals from Santiago approached the firm’s directors, Pablo Riquelme and Renzo Alvano, to create a modest weekend home about 45 minutes outside the Chilean capital, the brief asked for a boutique dwelling – a simple, one bedroom house that would act as a place for ‘leisure, entertaining and contemplation’, a kind of lookout point in a gorgeous but fairly remote part of the country. So remote, it turned out, that the architects would have to build on a site without even the basic services, such as water and electricity.