Live on the Edge with OPA's Casa Brutale

Ever wanted a house inside a cliff near the sea? Then Casa Brutale is just up your alley. It’s a concept design by OPA (Open Platform for Architecture) Works celebrating the brutalist style of architecture.

Live on the Edge with OPA's Casa Brutale

Ever wanted a house inside a cliff near the sea? Then Casa Brutale is just up your alley. It’s a concept design by OPA (Open Platform for Architecture) Works celebrating the brutalist style of architecture. It’s also designed to mesh well with nature. The building is completely embedded in the cliff, so it can’t be seen from the surface, which means it doesn’t obstruct the view of the sea. It also enjoys thermal isolation from the surrounding ground and cooling effect of the pool that sits above the rooms. Not to mention the magnificent color effect a pool over you glass ceiling gives!

Unclad and simple, the house is all about modesty, making no impact on the landscape beyond a surface swimming pool and a set of steps. Descending these steps, though, brings you to the entire point of this home; an enormous glass façade set flush into the cliff face, bringing an incredible view of the Aegean sea to the entire residence. Upping the stakes, the living quarters are topped with a skylight that turns out to be, in fact, the swimming pool - made of reinforced glass, it functions as the only other window in the house, diffusing the sunlight to soften the hard surfaces of the building itself and giving you views that could plausibly claim to be 100% water.

With jaw-dropping features like these, OPA chose to keep the rest restrained. Simple, raw concrete surfaces and slabs set off by aged wood and steel form the rest of the project, placing an open living area around the main stairs and a master bedroom on the mezzanine floor, making the incredible water views perfectly visible from the bed, which is also made of cast concrete. The whole thing is cooled by the landscape and the swimming pool, thanks to the design's clever twist - aside from the big chunk of rock removed from the cliff, there's very little impact on the landscape.

An inverted Casa Malaparte - brutalist, plain concrete mixed with water, light and rock - OPA says that their concept "seeks for an investor or an ambitious owner to finance its construction." Fill the pool with sharks for extra super villain points, although that might make the view from the bed a little off-putting.

Casa Brutale / Graphic files:

Opa Works is an architecture network by Greek architects Laertis Antonios Ando Vassiliou and Pantelis Kampouropoulos. The building would be built out of three concrete slabs, and feature concrete tables, benches and bed, all decorated with wood. It would be (brutally) minimalistic, with the major adorning feature being the imprints of boards used to shape the concrete.