Casa Beer Fuscaldo II is a party-wall house in the hills of Escazú, home to architect Franz Beer and artist Margarita Fuscaldo. The narrow rectangular lot organizes into four sub-levels split between a front and rear sector, connected by a ramp that climbs diagonally across the plan — the one element that breaks the strict orthogonality the site imposes.

The front volume holds the private program. It separates from the social spaces through a sequence of diagonal walls that form an internal facade, lit from above by a large glass skylight over the ramp — an atrium that pulls daylight into the center of the house. The smooth white walls are treated as proportional fields, each one calibrated to organize the large rectangular openings that alternate in position from room to room — a direct application of Beer’s intuitive geometric field research, here translated into the domestic section. The walls also serve as the primary surface for the couple’s collection of Costa Rican art, principally Margarita Fuscaldo’s own paintings. The one exception is the garden wall, which floats free of both floor and ceiling, the only surface kept clear of art, giving the space a sense of lightness at its far end. Where bioclimatic control or artwork protection requires it, horizontal louvers filter the light through the large glazed openings without interrupting sightlines between spaces.

The rear volume opens into the main living space, which conceals its true scale from the outside: it only reveals itself once you’ve climbed from the entry vestibule into the full height of the salon, watched over by the architect’s studio on the mezzanine above.

The street facade composes around two elements: a horizontal plane that allows views from the bedrooms out to the valley without exposing the interior, and a vertical volume marking the entrance — a deliberate response to the massing of the neighboring house.