Casa Pueblo by Carlos Páez Vilaró

Perched on the cliffs of Punta Ballena, Uruguay, Casa Pueblo is a whitewashed sprawl of hand-formed walls, cave-like rooms, and sunlit terraces that seem to melt into the sea. It’s more sculpture than structure; part coastal citadel, part dream.

Originally conceived as a summer house and studio by artist Carlos Páez Vilaró, it grew, organically and obsessively, into an architectural expression of a life lived through creation. Today, it houses a museum, gallery, and hotel, but above all, it stands as a poetic self-portrait in plaster.

Permanent movement in still form, Casa Pueblo’s facade

Carved seating in the Casa Pueblo cinema room

The Dialogue: Water, Birds, and Architecture in Motion

In the small, carved-out cinema inside Casa Pueblo, a short film plays on loop. In it, Vilaró speaks not of technical drawings or blueprints, but of rhythm and reverence. He describes the house as being shaped by the “permanent dialogue between birds and water”. An ongoing conversation that echoes in the building’s curves, its openness to breeze and light, and its refusal of straight lines. The result is architecture not as object, but as listener; responsive, alive, humble in the face of nature.

Vilaró’s studio bathed in blue light

Work as Rest, and the Joy of Never Finishing

For most, rest is the opposite of work. For Vilaró, the two were inseparable. “Working is resting,” he says, a mantra he lived out as he devoted nearly four decades to building Casa Pueblo with his own hands. In this never-ending project, we see the liberation of making without deadline; a process not driven by perfection but by passion. In its unfinished quality lies its charm, and its truth. Here, building is not about control, but about becoming. The house is never quite done, because the artist never stopped becoming.

Where working became resting

Whimsical guardians of the terrace

A Living Canvas: Paintings, Friendship, and Legacy

Beyond the walls, Vilaró's artistic soul is everywhere; his paintings, vibrant and poetic, line the galleries. There’s a sense of fluidity between disciplines: architecture bleeds into painting, into sculpture, into life. His friendship with Picasso (whose influence is unmistakable in his work) was not about imitation, but about shared freedom. Where Picasso once said "I do not seek, I find." Vilaró built that idea into a home. One that does not search for symmetry or permanence, but embraces spontaneity and change.

A living dialogue between land, sea, and sky

Casa Pueblo is not a building to be analysed; it’s one to be felt. A work of art you can inhabit, shaped not by architects but by improvisation, devotion, and love. Few places so fully embody the idea that design is life—that form, when free from formality, can become something deeply human. For Vilaró, creation was conversation. And Casa Pueblo is the ongoing echo of that conversation; between birds, water, light, and time. ° DK