In 1951, coinciding with the construction of the Spanish Pavilion at the Milan Triennale and the design of the Casa Marina in Barceloneta, Coderch designed the Ugalde House on the outskirts of Caldes d’Estrac, a town on the Maresme coast located 35 km north of Barcelona and favoured by the Catalan bourgeoisie. This is a single-family dwelling in which Coderch transforms the codes of vernacular architecture through an oblique and curved, almost spontaneous geometry that responds to the slope of the land, solar orientation and privileged views over the landscape and the Mediterranean Sea, establishing an absolute continuity between interior and exterior. An organic architecture that, almost acrobatically, moves between figuration rooted in the natural environment and the abstraction characteristic of the avant-garde art with which Coderch was involved during those years, turning the house into a kind of cinematic device.
After this unrepeatable work, the architect’s relationship with the Maresme coast continued over the following decades through a series of single-family housing projects, bearing witness to the evolution of his own work. In 1955 he acquired a plot very close to the Ugalde House and developed a housing project for his own family, which he soon simplified into a second version of reduced surface area, until he eventually abandoned it and the project was taken over by the Swiss architect William Dunkel. Traces of this “Cabanon Coderch” can still be recognised in the building that was ultimately constructed, despite its current dilapidated condition, which one hopes can be reversed as soon as possible.
In the same year, 1955, he designed the Boada House in the nearby town of Sant Vicenç de Montalt, a dwelling located on the second line back from the well-known Passeig dels Anglesos in Caldetes. Developed on a single storey in an L-shaped plan, it presents a very clear division between the daytime living area, the night-time sleeping area and the service zone, all oriented towards a landscaped outdoor space with a swimming pool. The built project was intended to serve as a model for promoting a residential development in the same area, which ultimately never materialised, but which proved decisive instead —as a direct precedent and true laboratory— for the Catasús House that he would design in Sitges a few years later.
In the following decade, in 1965, Coderch designed the Martínez Hidalgo House in a then-expanding residential development on the outskirts of Arenys de Mar. In this case it is a two-storey dwelling on a flat plot —a relatively unusual solution for the architect— with an L-shaped layout, south-facing and open to the exterior space, forming a series of highly recognisable white volumes that stand between Mediterranean tradition and the influence of North American architecture. Two years later, in 1967, he designed the Rovira House in Canet de Mar, also organised on two levels, but taking advantage of the steep slope of the site and its privileged position overlooking the sea. The house is developed as a series of set-back volumes (“kinks”, as Coderch himself describes them in his project reports), characterised by openings protected with louvred shutters, the use of ceramic tile flooring both inside and outside, and the introduction of an occasional metal column in combination with the customary load-bearing wall structure.
Finally, already in the following decade, work began in 1971 on the Llansó House, on a plot located on a wooded hillside in Sant Vicenç de Montalt, in this case somewhat removed from the sea, but which likewise takes advantage of the slope of the land to arrange two storeys and open up towards favourable orientations. As in the Rovira House, the discreet volume presented to the street —here resolved with an exposed brick façade, as in many of Coderch’s works from this period— conceals a broad functional programme organised around three internal courtyards, framed by long continuous walls of a Neo-Plasticist lineage which, together with the occasional use of metal columns, reveal an interest in the work of Mies van der Rohe and the increasingly active participation in the studio of his son, Gustavo Coderch.
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