On the Valencian coast, where the agricultural plain of Gandia meets a fabric of low-density residential growth, J House proposes a domestic architecture that is at once assertive in form and quiet in use.

The house is composed of two interlocking prismatic volumes arranged in an L-shaped plan. The larger volume is wrapped in a second skin of vertical WPC slats in an earth tone — a permeable envelope that filters the intense Mediterranean light, tempers the interior climate, and gives the house a unified, almost monolithic reading from the street. The smaller volume, finished in smooth white render, acts as a deliberate pause: a counterpoint that breaks the mass and marks the threshold between public front and private interior.

That interior is organized around a courtyard garden, the true heart of the project. Rather than a representational garden, it is conceived as an inhabited outdoor room: a continuous WPC deck — the same material as the façade slats, folding the vertical skin into a horizontal ground plane — structured around centenary olive trees planted in circular white concrete planters. The olive tree is not a decorative choice but a cultural one: an acknowledgment of the Valencian agricultural landscape as memory and reference. The L-shaped arrangement of the built volumes orients and shelters this courtyard, turning it into an extension of the living spaces for most of the year.

Inside, the social areas take the double-height section as their organizing principle — a device inherited from the modern tradition, deployed here not as quotation but as a working tool. Space expands vertically, opens generously toward the courtyard, and closes toward the access front, producing a carefully graded transition between exterior and interior, between exposure and retreat.

The result is a house that resolves a tension few residential projects manage to hold: bold in its geometry, warm in its inhabitation.

Fact Sheet
Project name: J House (Casa J)

Architecture: Hulot Arch. Studio

Lead architects: Estela Sanchis Part, Pedro Luis Palencia Soriano

Location: Gandia, Valencia, Spain

Year of completion: 2021

Built area: 379 m²

Typology: Single-family house

Structural engineering: CUB Estudi

Photography: Milena Villalba

Selected suppliers: Interior carpentry — Carpintería Pellicer · Exterior lattice — Cerámica a Mano Alzada · Kitchen — Chef · Timber façade framework — Disegna (Bastone®) · Façade system — Saint-Gobain Placo Ibérica (Placotherm® Integra) · Interior door handles — Noha · Doors and motorization — Corpesa-2

Two interlocking prisms —one clad in earth-toned WPC slats, one in smooth white— frame a courtyard of centenary olive trees on the Valencian coast. J House, Gandia, by Hulot arch. studio.