The fifth elevation, re-engineered.
One architectural plane, two outputs. The roof we already install for the sun is the roof that catches the rain.
The roof was already the answer.
A luxury villa on Ibiza installs, on average, three to five hundred square metres of photovoltaic surface. That surface is tilted, glazed, food-grade in everything but designation, and exposed to the only meaningful source of fresh water the island receives — direct rainfall.
Las Lluvias begins with a single architectural question: if we are already committing this much sealed, inert, sun-facing area to the production of electricity, what does it cost to make the same plane do a second job. The answer, properly engineered, is small. The output, properly certified, is potable rainwater. The fifth elevation — the roof — stops being a single-purpose surface and becomes dual infrastructure. The villa keeps its silhouette. The architect keeps his line. The hydrology of the parcel changes entirely.
Engineered for the parcel.
Las Lluvias is delivered in two architectural approaches, selected to suit a villa’s typology and its planning context — from full new-build integration to the heritage-sensitive parcel where a traditional finished elevation is required. Both deliver the same outcome: the household’s own solar electricity and its own certified potable rainwater, from a single roof.
The engineering that makes this possible — the collection geometry, the treatment specification, and the envelope detail — is proprietary and protected. It is documented in full for qualified partners and investors under confidentiality, and is not described here.
No visible additional infrastructure. The architectural register is unchanged; the building’s relationship to its parcel is transformed.
The constraint is the product.
The discipline of Las Lluvias is not to add. It is to take a surface the owner is already committing capital to install, refuse to let it serve a single output, and re-engineer it into infrastructure. The architectural register that follows from this discipline is the register of restraint — the unornamented horizontal, the suppressed datum, the silhouette the eye does not catch on. The aesthetic vocabulary is the vocabulary of the contemporary luxury hospitality estate at its most reduced: stone, lime, water, shadow.
Nothing is added to be seen. Everything that is added does work. That is the architectural argument. The hydrology of the parcel is the dividend.