House of the Carpenter

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DB-This is a wonderful account of building a colonial home in Granada, Nicaragua. Robert Mellin is a talented architect who shows what he did and why he did, along with a photo journal. This is special to us because it is right around the corner from our own home. The Casa del Carpintero is well known in Granada.

Granada, Nicaragua
By Robert Mellin, Ph.D., RCA, FRAIC, NLAA

This residential project for the use of my family is located in a non-touristic residential neighbourhood just outside the historic district of Granada, Nicaragua, about a block and a half east of the San Francisco Convent. We became interested in Granada through our daughter Hannah who has been a volunteer teacher in different schools in Granada in the summer over the past four years. The opportunity arose in August of 2011 to purchase a house where an old carpenter lived and worked. At the time, he was in his mid-80s and still working. His family wanted him to move to a new, smaller house. Occasionally I still see him walking around Granada with his tools.

All that could be saved for the reconstruction of this house was the front wood-reinforced adobe wall, an almond tree in front of the house, and three fruit trees in the courtyard. Everything else was derelict. The heritage conservation guidelines required the retention of the adobe wall with its original fenestration, and we were able to save this wall with the help of a local specialist in adobe construction. The front steps were shifted to the centre of the house with a slightly widened front veranda for sitting outside in the
evening. You enter the house through a vestibule open to the garden, and the garden acts as a screen or spirit wall for privacy. When I first visited Granada, I observed that the most attractive aspect of Granada’s colonial vernacular architecture was the extensive use
of large open verandas for almost all daily activities, and these verandas are typically sheltered by beautifully constructed wood and tile roofs with views of courtyard gardens. Finally, release from a lifetime of living in enclosed rooms in northern latitudes!

I configured the bedrooms to be as small as possible, but also as open as possible by using 5’ x 9’ double doors that could open these rooms to the courtyard. These doors were influenced by the proportions of the existing doors in the front adobe wall of the house. To either side of the front entrance vestibule are bedrooms with double-height ceilings. The front roof is configured with continuous clerestory perforated concrete vent blocks to catch the prevailing wind from the lake to the east of the town. These vent blocks also permit a ventilation stack effect when there is little wind.

The large open veranda accessed from the front entrance has an “L” shape. The reason this veranda does not extend all the way around the courtyard is because of the old jocote fruit tree towards the back of the property (the plan of the reconstructed house defers to the existing tree locations). The open veranda has a sitting/studio area, parallel to the front of the house, and in the extended “L” along the north boundary you pass through the dining and then the kitchen area en route to the back courtyard.In Granada’s houses, there were once more formal front courtyards with gardens, and different back or secondary courtyards for utility (kitchens, washing clothes). The heritage regulations for Granada stipulate that if you install a swimming pool, this is not permitted in the front courtyard. At the end of the kitchen part of the veranda there is a low intermediate wall that screens the view of the back courtyard. Just before approaching wide stair/seats with three risers leading to the back courtyard, there is an open-air shower. Behind the low courtyard wall to the left is a typical concrete clothes washing stand (I am very fond of these locally-made units), and to the right is a small swimming pool.

Along the back boundary of the property to the left is a bedroom with its bathroom, and to the right a storage room with the pump and filter for the swimming pool. Again, large double doors were used for the bedroom and bathroom for ventilation and views to the courtyard. All along the top of the high back wall of this shed-roof structure is a generous area of perforated concrete vent blocks to catch the breeze from the lake.

The strategy for circulation in the house is indirect, involving some twists and turns to attempt not to reveal everything at first glance. It is hoped that when the garden matures this effect will be enhanced (in Granada’s climate this will not take long). Nature will be permitted to take over to an extent, especially as over twenty bougainvillea have been planted adjacent to walls all around the courtyard. The garden strategy is to plant a high garden (native Nicaraguan robelliana palms supplemented by Miami palms) that provides partial shade to a lower garden (hibiscus and other shrubs, plus ornamental ground cover plants and banana trees). We have also planted a mango tree.

As Granada has a six-month long rainy season with torrential downpours, a strategy was devised for drainage in the courtyard. Water from the shed roof of the wing at the back of the courtyard is directed by a metal gutter to two funnels, each with a heavy galvanized chain to stabilize the flow of water. This is a typical detail one finds in many courtyards in Granada’s houses. The water then flows through a narrow, open concrete drainage channel across the front of the back wing, and then to a channel between the jocote tree and the swimming pool. This channel then turns to the north and then to the west to connect with a tall and narrow waterfall aperture in the intermediate courtyard wall. From there, the water flows all around the “L” shaped courtyard in a sloped concrete drainage channel filled with the large stones found on site during construction of the foundations for the house, and the water then flows under the floor of the open veranda and the front part of the house to the street. The water drainage channels were inspired by similar channels I observed at an old colonial house near Bogota, Colombia, and also by my McGill colleague Professor Ricardo Castro’s books about the projects of the Colombian architect Rogelio Salmona. Salmona elegantly celebrated the flow of water in his projects, rather than hiding it. Ricardo has also influenced my ideas about paving, as a potential surface for expression for the architect and experience for the user.

Different surfaces and textures are incorporated in the House of the Carpenter. Traditional locally made grey Italian cement tiles are used for the rooms and the open verandas under their sheltered roofs. The back courtyard has large flat stepping stones, gramma (grass) under the jocote tree, and repello (cement plaster) for the drainage channels and swimming pool collar. The idea is to challenge the users of the house with irregularities in paving, especially in the back courtyard. This is a continuation of the diligence required for safely walking on Granada’s sidewalks. One has to be ever vigilant not to fall into open drains or open pits for sewers and exposed water meters! I feel strongly that occasionally challenging people with irregular paving surfaces is potentially good for our health and well-being, introducing a beneficial “resistance” to easy living by toning our reflexes and sense of balance. Provided you don’t fall into a hole!

The front and back courtyard walls were built inside the existing old brick boundary walls of our immediate neighbours. We wanted to expose something of the history of the construction of these existing walls, so we introduced niches or small recesses at regular
intervals around the courtyard to expose parts of the old brick walls. In the smaller niches, candles will be placed at night, similar to the memorial niches of Asplund’s and Lewerentz’s Woodland Cemetery chapel in Sweden, and also similar to the candle niches
once found in the courtyard of the old plantation house near Bogota that I visited.

I designed all the furniture for the house. A talented master carpenter (Raul) and his crew are presently making the furniture on a finka (farm) in the mountains near Granada. Some of the wood we hope to use is guapinol, or the wood from the “stinking toes” tree
(hymenaea courbaril). The “stinking toes” reputation comes from the smell of the fruit of this tree, which is apparently delicious despite its aroma. This wood oxidizes to an incredibly beautiful deep red luster, and has a density several times that of oak. It is
resistant to termites, and is very heavy. Once cured, it is almost impossible to drive a nail into this wood. All the high doors of the house were made from guapinol.

Another influence for this project is the work of Studio Mumbai. This studio of architects, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, plasterers, ceramicists, and metalworkers works in an exemplary collaborative manner. Extensive use of sketchbooks with drawings by hand to evolve details is part of their daily work, even for non-architects (for example, even electricians!). Their work is breathtaking in its elegant understated simplicity. They pay attention to the deeper structure of vernacular architecture, material culture, and cultural landscapes, yet their work is modern. They have evolved a way of working that takes into account local culture and environmental conditions, even building step-wells for several of their projects in India.

Stephen Crickmar and his sons Toby and Daniel built our house. I got to know many of the construction workers, and they were extremely hard working despite the at-times incredible heat. Although we did not work in a collaborative design/build atelier situation, we came close to this in spirit and I look forward to the possibility of working on other similar projects in Granada- provided I can learn to speak Spanish!

To see photos of the project before and after construction, see:

http://robertmellinarchitect.ca/gn.html

Robert Mellin, Ph.D., RCA, FRAIC, NLAA

Architect and Associate Professor, McGill University

http://robertmellinarchitect.ca/index.html
http://www.mcgill.ca/architecture/faculty/mellin/

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