Designers: Obreval Area: 80 m ² Year: 2024 Photography: Par Fotógrafos, Ivan Ortiz Ponce Lead Designers: Pablo Zarama
Place: Nocaima
Nation: Colombia
Retreat in Nocaima by Obreval is an 80-square-meter home situated in the rich hills of Nocaima, Colombia. Completed in 2024, the project provides a modern reinterpretation of rural Colombian architecture through a compact house that is sensitive to environment, material custom, and landscape. The design revisits bamboo building, sloping roofing types, and open passages, changing them into architectural gadgets that support structure, blood circulation, and ecological response. Its butterfly-shaped roofing gathers and channels rainwater, making sustainability part of the house’s spatial identity and official expression. Bamboo columns composed of four linked stems are set on black steel bases, combining local workmanship with exact contemporary detailing. Through these elements, the retreat provides a grounded yet positive model for rural living, where cultural memory and ecological efficiency are incorporated into a refined architectural language.
Retreat in Nocaima approaches the rural home as a built dialogue in between acquired structure practices and modern architectural precision. Instead of treating the Colombian countryside as a backdrop, Obreval positions the house as a determined intervention within the surface, utilizing its modest scale to check out wider questions of product honesty, weather adjustment, and cultural continuity.
The task is set among the rolling hills of Nocaima, where the landscape is specified by greenery, humidity, and shifting weather condition. In response, the house embraces an open and light-weight character, allowing its architecture to stay closely tied to the conditions of the site. The style does not replicate vernacular architecture as an image.
Instead, it studies the reasoning behind rural forms and translates them into a more deliberate spatial and structural language. 
Bamboo is central to this reinterpretation. Traditionally connected with local construction, it is used here with a sense of refinement and control. The columns are formed from four intertwined bamboo stems, creating a structural rhythm that is both tactile and precise. Their black steel bases supply a clear contrast, grounding the natural product while presenting a contemporary technical language. The composition likewise carries a subtle recommendation to Mies van der Rohe, linking modernist discipline with regional craft. © Par Fotógrafos Retreat in Nocaima/ Obreval 22 © Ivan Ortiz Ponce The roof gives your home its most recognizable architectural gesture. By changing the traditional rural pitched roof into a butterfly-shaped covering, Obreval turns rainwater collection into a defining feature of the project. The roof channels water while shaping the interior atmosphere and outside profile of your home. Its kind is at once practical and meaningful, signing up with environmental performance with a poetic reading of climate. Open passages and shaded transitional spaces enhance the relationship in between domestic life and the surrounding landscape. These components remember rural precedents, but they are handled as spatial instruments that frame views, encourage ventilation, and soften the limit in between exterior and interior. Your home, for that reason, becomes less a sealed things than a responsive structure shaped by weather, movement, and daily occupation.
© Par Fotógrafos © Par Fotógrafos © Par Fotógrafos © Par Fotógrafos Through its restrained size and cautious detailing, Retreat in Nocaima proposes a peaceful alternative to rural advancement based on excess or replica. Its architectural value lies in the clarity of its gestures and'the intelligence with which it remodels familiar elements. Rooted in Colombian rural culture yet available to modern experimentation, the project shows how a small house can carry substantial architectural, environmental, and cultural intent. Project Gallery © Par Fotógrafos © Par Fotógrafos < img width="1140"height="760"src="// www.w3.org/2000/svg'%20width='1140'%20height='760'%20viewBox='0%200%201140%20760'%3E%3C/svg%3E"alt="Retreat in nocaima/ obreval"data-src="https://www.architecturelab.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/retiro-en-nocaima-obreval_2-1140x760.jpg"/ > © Ivan Ortiz Ponce © Par Fotógrafos
© Ivan Ortiz Ponce © Par Fotógrafos
© Ivan Ortiz Ponce © Par Fotógrafos © Par Fotógrafos © Par Fotógrafos © Par Fotógrafos 
© Par Fotógrafos
Retreat in Nocaima/ Obreval 23
Retreat in Nocaima/ Obreval 24 Task Place Address: Nocaima, Colombia The location is provided for basic referral and might represent a city or nation, instead of a particular address.