Cuernavaca Guest Bathrooms / Mario Herrera Holgado

Text description provided by the architects. The need to build some guest bathrooms and a storage room made us question the traditional models for these spaces. The first part of the project was based on finding the right location within the property, which houses a historic house built more than a hundred years ago, located in the city center of Cuernavaca. At the rear of the house, a large concrete slab suggests the location of a garden. It is right there where the first action arises, raising the concrete slab to be in contact with the earth again, lowering the temperature considerably and beginning the process of bringing the garden back.

The construction of three partition walls gives shape to a dislocated triangle that embraces two cells on the interior, both of the same dimensions. To the south, one of these three walls forms a small storage room with the help of another wall of the house. Another of its faces closes the triangle.

In the contained space inside the small triangular pavilion the cells house the functions of a toilet, dressing room, and shower. They create a second level of contained spaces when the user so requires, but they can also expand and merge with each other by folding the doors, creating a kind of almost maze-like space, where the body wanders to experience its function.

From the pavilion, one can hear the rain and smell the moss. In harmony with nature, a series of wooden columns, doors, dim lighting, and brickwork on the floor is enough to release the wastewater from the sink and the shower, in order to avoid the installation of drainage. According to this conception in which nature and space seem to feed off each other, there is no drain, the water returns to the garden.