House facades: types and recommendations

What types of house facades exist?

What is the most recommended facade for my house in Barcelona?

In this post we tell you the the types of facades and our recommendations.
In case you do not know us yet, let us introduce ourselves.
We are ERA architects, one of the young, committed and creative Architecture studios in Barcelona.
In this post you can find our professional and simple explanation of types of facades and recommendations.

What is a facade?
They are the exterior walls of the house

What types of facades are there?

We can distinguish between different categories: by constructive systems, composition or materials.

SYSTEM
Heavy or light

COMPOSITION
Simple or multilayered

MATERIALS
Wide range of materials: concrete, stone, wood, metal, plastic, plant and mud.

HEAVY FACADES

SIMPLE
They are façades that work for a single mass material.
They are usually made of stone, concrete, ceramics, wood or straw.
A clear example is the cathedrals with walls in mass of stone of up to 2m thick.

MULTILAYER
They are facades with other layers besides the one of the material in mass.
These layers are the ventilated chamber and the thermal insulation.
An extended and innovative example is the facade of SATE (Thermal Insulation System Abroad)
This system allows to have the insulation bonded to the wall in bulk by the outer face, add as a final finish a plaster and have a ventilated outer face.
The plastering is a type of system that combines exterior walls that are very widespread and traditional in Spain.

LIGERAS FACADES

SIMPLE
They are single-layer systems.
There are self-supporting systems that do not require structure such as metal sandwich panels (insulating panels covered with thin metallic layer).
There are also systems that need metal or wood structure support.
There are different options of material being the most common metallic, polycarbonate, wood or even straw panels.
They usually have low levels of insulation and therefore they are recommended for very warm and tropical climates whenever good ventilation is procured.

MULTILAYER
Like heavy ones, lightweight adds other layers to the light system.
These layers of air chamber and insulation are usually located on the outside of the house.
This allows you to create ventilated facades with little wall thickness.
Another layer that can be added is a vapor barrier in the inner face.
This allows a hermetic house of the outside climate but still constantly ventilated with internal air renewals.

In our Architecture studio in Barcelona ERA architects, our main goal is to make comfortable houses that function to your needs. For this reason we recommend to make houses with ventilated facade.

You may check out our online house editor CasaAPP to see prices and types in 3D. Or download house editor APP in Google Play (only for Android tablets for now, sorry!).
(the WEB editor takes 3 minutes to load. You may not be able to load if you don’t have a powerful computer: so sorry, we are working to improve the APP)

Hope this post helps you!
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