Principal Architect of LYS Architecture Lorraine Yu-Serrano believes that every home should reflect its client and its environment. "This exact house could only have been born for this family and in this place," she explains.
By listening intently to the family's needs, observing their behavior and adding to that the qualities of the specific site the home sits on, Yu-Serrano crafts a home with features and solutions unique to the project.
The Courtyard House is located inside a golf course with a view of a mountain range. Since the frontage faces southwest - the hottest rays of the sun - the home features a stone base with gridded ventanillas on the second floor. The ventanillas allow for ventilation and some light to enter while adding privacy.
By splitting the home into two volumes, a courtyard was created with views to the golf course. This also created a wing for each brother of the family on the second floor while defining spaces on the first.
Lorraine U. Serrano of LYS Architecture presents the Courtyard House, a project designed as a \"love letter\" from a son to his parents. The design emphasizes harmony between the environment, the climate, and the specific needs of the family, utilizing traditional Filipino elements to create a space that feels honest, familiar, and deeply personal.
What I need from the architecture is to see it as a puzzle that needs to be solved.
Regarding the opportune moment, everything hinges on it.
Now, this study is an opportunity to reflect.
Hi, I am Lorraine U. Serrano.
I am the lead architect at LYS Architecture.
That is the Courtyard House.
Every few years, the night coincides with the ventanillas.
These are thoughts that emerge with input and output, provided for study in privacy.
These thoughts are wrongly conceived, now, now, the thoughts with first love for the climate,
the doctors with patients
Probably, my lesson is an opportunity for window openings.
Mapachak lago. The criss-cross pattern is something very distinct to our Filipino.
culture, and whenever you see it, you feel that warmth and familiarity. We carried
it out throughout the house in different interpretations. Sometimes it's very
small and restrained, carved into the main door. In the living room, it's
newly appeared on a larger scale, more three-dimensional,
The subtle repetition enables us to sustain that architectural rhythm.
A house should reflect the environment in which it is built.
and the people who will live there
Just because I think a house cannot be any other way.
We are here, as designers, to create these spaces specifically for people.
Their specific lives, their families, and how they behave, how they gather, how they wish to rest.
And then, of course, you also need to respond to the environment, because without it, the house just feels out of place.
This very house could only have come into existence within this family and in this place.
The design evolved from their story and the land itself, making it truly unique and belonging entirely to them and to this place.
In many ways, it became a love letter from a son to his parents.
True architecture is never imposed; it listens.
It listens to the land, the climate, and the people who live there.
The house should always feel like it belongs.
When your architecture is honest, it grows naturally from the surroundings and the lives it is meant to hold.
That's how I feel architecture should be.
It should respond to a need.
It should be a response to people, because that is the reason we are doing what we are doing.
It is not merely for our egos that we wish to erect monuments.
A house should be lived in.
You hear the clunking of the plates.
You hear music.
That's what I think a house should be like.
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