Magnolia House is an intimate and poetic residence designed for the architect’s mother—a tribute rooted in her cherished affinity for magnolia trees. The home’s design deliberately revolves around a central courtyard where a magnolia blooms at the heart, serving as both a literal and symbolic anchor to nature.

Perched in a mountain valley, the house emerges like a graceful spaceship, its thin, post-tensioned concrete slab hovering over the landscape. Concrete walls seamlessly envelop inhabitants with gentle protection, while expansive glass allows sunlight, air, and dramatic views to flow through, merging interior and exterior in a continuous sensory embrace.

The carefully selected materials—cast-in-place concrete, steel, glass—and thoughtful environmental systems (including solar thermal collectors and insulated roofing) bring together comfort, refinement, and sustainability.

Inside, spaces unfold organically: communal areas align with the terrace and courtyard, while private zones—bedrooms, bathrooms, guest quarters—are arranged in serene wings. The home also introduces Near Life, a furniture collection blending craftsmanship and technology into evocative organic forms.

Magnolia House is more than a home—it is an experiential sanctuary that celebrates memory, light, craftsmanship, and nature.

Type: Single family house

Date: 2022

Area: 750sqm

Location: Arrayanes, Ecuador

Status: Built

Domino
Domino is a development of multiple houses and variable sizes of apartments on an elongated piece of land on the slopes of mountainous Cumbaya, Ecuador, a suburb of capital city Quito. Using only concrete, steel, and glass, the project takes advantage of the slope to create residences of different sizes (houses and apartments ranging from 1000 to 1600 square feet).

Communal spaces such as gym, sports grounds, working spaces, pools, kids rooms, etc., are located on the roofs of each block, creating a social connection on the higher levels of the project besides the ground floor garden. This allows for the residences to have a continuous shared social loop along the project.

Cumbaya, Ecuador

Designed in 2023-2024; construction to begin 2025
Architecture, interiors, landscape

Near Life is a collection of functional objects—chairs, sofas, tables, lamps, sculptures and lounge seating—that transforms everyday furniture into sculptural encounters. Inspired by the forms of nature yet distilled into sleek, minimal gestures, each piece feels both familiar and otherworldly, animated and serene. Crafted from a fusion of high-tech and tactile materials—lacquered wood, handmade fiberglass, Brazilian onix, automotive paint, and soft textiles—the collection balances strength with intimacy, precision with warmth. Surfaces shift with light and perspective, revealing new qualities as one moves around them, while their organic silhouettes evoke “fossils from the future,” objects that appear timeless yet ahead of their time. More than furniture, NEAR LIFE is an invitation to touch, contemplate, and connect—bridging functionality with emotion, and turning daily rituals into poetic experiences.

Location: Guaranda - Ecuador

Year: 2012

Type: Single family retreat

Client: Private

Size: 135 sqm

ENG

Conceived for the high altitudes and extreme weather of the Andes Mountain Range, the walls of the retreat design the exterior spaces as much as they define the interior ones ensuring that all parts of the dwelling receive direct sunlight along the day.

Built in Ecuador in 2012, the first Clover House is set 3,600 meters high near the Chimborazo mountain on an irregular landscape surrounded by open views. 

This project incorporates ideas of repetition and variation on an architectural scale: The plan of the house accepts the traditional latin-american approach to divide the sleeping from the living and from the kitchen. These elements are organised and connected by a single continuous wall that takes on a variety of geometries enabling diversity of spaces in a site that could be considered like a tabula rasa. 

This results in a singular habitat where each room uniquely fragments and frames the surrounding landscape with openings on the walls that help appreciate the specificities of the environment, while creating outdoor program such as an entrance, a terrace, and a garden. Budget constrains and the need to respect the site lead to a minimum gesture for a maximum affect.

ESP

Prototipo habitacional para la Cordillera de Los Andes, la Casa Trebol fue concebida para grandes alturas y climas extremos. Las paredes del hogar generan tanto los espacios exteriores como los interiores, garantizando que todas las secciones de la vivienda reciban luz solar directa a lo largo del día.

La primera Casa Trébol se sitúa a 3,600 metros de altura, cerca de la montaña Chimborazo.

Este proyecto incorpora ideas de repetición y variación en una escala arquitectónica. La planta de la casa integra el enfoque de la tradición latinoamericana de dividir los espacios privados de la sala y de la cocina. Estos elementos están organizados y conectados por una sola piel contínua que se desenvuelve en una variedad de geometrías, permitiendo diversidad de espacios.

Esto resulta en un hábitat singular, en donde cada cuarto se fragmenta de manera única y enmarca el paisaje de los alrededores con aperturas en las paredes que ayudan a apreciar las especificidades del entorno.

“Everlasting Motion Monoliths” presents a series of metallic fluid sculptures that materialize a continuous process of transformation. Neither fixed nor finite, these forms resist categorization, reflecting the ever-evolving relationship between art, identity, and materiality. They appear as if caught mid-movement—between solid and liquid, between reflection and distortion—inviting viewers into a meditative encounter with the undefined and the transitional.

Simulating natural phenomena through forms that feel organic yet are made of refractive nickel, the works confront the human urge to separate what is called natural from what is called artificial. In truth, everything we name emerges either from nature, from human intervention, or from the entanglement between the two. Their mirrored surfaces seem to adapt to their surroundings, camouflaging within the space while simultaneously breaking it. The reflection is never whole: organic distortions generate subtle glitches, unsettling what they mirror and exposing the fragile tension between context and object, perception and reality.

At their core, the sculptures live between categories—adaptive and disruptive, natural and artificial, invisible and hyper-visible. They invite viewers to reconsider the boundaries we impose on matter, and to witness how perception itself creates distinction.

Foresta is a restaurant born from a dialogue between ancestral memory and contemporary experimentation. Inspired by the pre-Columbian cuisine of the Andes, where volcanic rock was the essential cooking tool, the project translates this legacy into a culinary and architectural space that reinterprets tradition with a sculptural and technological language.

The heart of the restaurant is a series of monolithic islands, carved from a single piece of volcanic rock, which become open, multifunctional kitchens: grilling, oven, frying, and steaming coexist on their surfaces. These sculptures not only embrace haute cuisine technology but also allow chefs to work in front of diners, creating a gastronomic spectacle in which cooking becomes a performance and the act of eating a shared experience.

Above these islands, a poetic and surprising ceiling unfolds: a reflective surface, lined with nickel, that seems to flow like a liquid sky. Its cosmic character connects earth and firmament, evoking the vision of ancestral communities who interpreted nature as an indivisible whole. The restaurant's activities are dynamically reflected there, multiplying the sensorial experience and giving each dish a theatrical dimension.

The atmosphere is austere and powerful: natural concrete floors and walls, stone tables and tableware, stainless steel pieces that provide a raw, industrial tone, and black velvet-upholstered furniture to soften the space's mineral impact. Warm lighting envelops the space, making the experience feel intimate and welcoming, balancing the rustic with the sophisticated.

Foresta is situated halfway between the more informal tradition of sharing a meal around the fire and the precision of fine dining. It is a space where ancestral materials and techniques dialogue with contemporary haute cuisine, creating a unique experience in Quito: earthly and cosmic, intimate and spectacular.

Escudero elaborates: “Foresta’s design embraces the fluid relationship between space, light, and the natural world. The reflective ceiling allows the space to adapt and transform throughout the day, capturing the ever-evolving play of light. This dynamic quality reflects the Andean worldview, where the connection between the gods and the earth is represented by trees, our roots in the natural world. The “eye” of the reflective ceiling above the cooking and dining surfaces invites contemplation, evoking the union of the earthly and the divine, creating a space that is both grounded and transcendent.”