Designer / Architect: RCR Arquitectes

Client: School-Ing

Personal / Commissioned: Personal Project

Location: Vall de Bianya, La Garrotxa - Spain Spain

Some of you might recognize this house from its appearance in the Netlix show “The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes” on his episode about Spain. This project was commisioned by Fina Puigdevall, Chef Of The Restaurant `Les Cols’ and designed by renowned studio RCR arquitectes, of whom I’ve been admiring their work since they won a Pritzker Prize.

I got the opportunity to visualize this house as I was doing an Archviz Master in School-Ing (Spain), under the guidance of Adan Martin and Eduardo Rodriguez. I was asked to pick a project built in an interesting and challenging landscape. I did a bit of research and after lurking over 200 projects I stumbled onto this beauty in the middle of a dreamlike forest. Less than a second took me to decide this was going to be the subject of the exercise.

The Process:

Modeled the geometry in 3dsmax with the help of 2D plans found on the Croquis Magazine.
Topography was built using references from Google Earth and photographs of the area.
For the forest, I used Forest Pack, a very popular scattering plugin for 3ds Max, to distribute the grass and several versions of trees that were previously edited to get the desired albedos variations on the leaves.
The atmosphere was built using VRayEnvironmentFog, an atmospheric effect that allows the simulation of participating media like fog.
Some small tweaks, mainly in terms of contrast, were done in Photoshop, (except for the interior view, where I tried to integrate myself into the frame as if to fantasize with the idea of living there)

That’s mostly it. Hope you enjoyed it.
Cheers!
Gino Giampaolo.