Spain is a popular tourist destination, and the number of visitors to this European country are swelling all the time. With hotels and Airbnbs popping up all over the place at an alarming rate, it’s becoming more difficult to secure planning permissions for new properties, especially in residential areas. Even residents who already own properties in coveted coastal locations are often limited when it comes to expanding them, so sometimes the only option is to build up instead of out. This was the exact solution that Laura Ortín Architects found for a client with a property they wanted to extend in the port city of Alicante on Spain?s Costa Blanca.

More specifically, this beach house is located in La Torre de la Horadada, a small fishing town popular among tourists, and is used as a vacation home by its owners. Ultimately, they decided to make a bold statement by planting a futuristic extension on top of their existing one-story house. While the majority of the houses in the neighborhood incorporated informal additions on their ground floors (usually toward the rear of the houses in the garden), Laura Ortín decided to take a different approach ? mostly because the urban grain of the town had already changed dramatically from what it originally was. This gave her the opportunity to think beyond the confines of the existing constructions and imagine something altogether new. The architects would then go on to ?propose a new code, a sort of aesthetic and functional di...