84. Atrio Hotel and Restaurant

ATRIO: THE DOMESTICITY OF THE HERMIT CRAB

The new Relais-Châteaux Atrio in the Plaza de San Mateo in Cáceres aims to rethink the city from the premises that made it possible and to imagine how this can be achieved in our time, making contemporary architecture coexist with a historical environment, with respect and dignity.

Within the historical center of Cáceres, the site on which the new building was constructed was made up of two existing structures of very different characteristics. The first was a three-story auxiliary building along the Calle de los Condes, while the second was a two-story house with a rooftop built in the early 1980s in the Plaza de San Mateo.

Over these two structures, which had deteriorated due to years of disuse, the new construction settles like a domestic hermit crab inside a lifeless shell, revitalizing and rehabilitating the abandoned buildings and establishing an organic symbiosis that gains new meaning as contemporary architecture.

The new building houses two complementary functions: the new location for the Atrio restaurant and a small Relais-Châteaux hotel with fourteen rooms. On the ground floor are the hotel reception, the restaurant, and its kitchen. On the two upper floors are the hotel rooms. The circulation on these floors revolves around a small atrium, giving the space a scale that connects it with the traditional houses and palaces that line the historic city. Above the first floor is a discreet indoor leisure area, open to the garden, with two small pools located at the rear. A small terrace opens onto the Plaza de San Mateo, offering distant views of the historic center of Cáceres and its surrounding fields. Between these two distinct areas, a pergola is built, designed to soften the environment of the Plaza de San Mateo by introducing the green presence of climbing plants.

The new functional organism adapts to the irregularities of the existing buildings' perimeter and manifests itself outwardly in the landscaped interior courtyard, through a tapestry of slender white concrete pillars complemented with wooden and black bakelite joinery.

Inside, white-painted oak woods, on which furniture and art rest peacefully, seek to unify the various areas of the new construction. The black granite, laid as if it were a wooden deck, forms the neutral plane of activity in both the hotel and the restaurant.

The various spaces are constructed as intimate environments, furnished with a radical sense of domesticity, subtly opening their views onto the public spaces, the street, the atrium, and the garden, making what is necessary feel close and what is close feel necessary.