Acebo x Alonso renovates a 1925house in Madrid, recovers its twocourtyards and turns one of theminto a multifunctional space,including a swimming pool

This semi-detached single-family house, built in one of Madrid’s historic colonias, was built, in 1925. Its architecture, like that of so many houses of this kind, kept changing through additions and repairs that, over time, moved it away from its original layout. In 1971 one of the changes with the greatest symbolic force takes place, its owners at the time sacrifice most of the space of the back courtyard to build a blue swimming pool, an object that during the years of Spanish desarrollismo represents the promise of a different life, more hedonistic and aspirational than the one that gave rise to the house.

«When we first visited this house in 2021 we found a kind of shabby palimpsest to which accessories such as canopies, aerials, or wiring had kept being added» say the architects of Acebo x Alonso. Only the old swimming pool, chipped and with successive layers of blue paint, held out as witness to that imaginary frozen in time. Understanding the house before intervening in it becomes the first step of the project, deciphering what belonged to the original model of the house and what had been modified or added.

Bringing the house into this century

The brief from the new owner family, who wanted to make the house their permanent residence, was to bring the house into the 21st century without giving up its character. Across some 150 square metres spread over two floors and the attic, the project organises the layout to accommodate the new domestic needs, and balances this goal with the volumetric protection restrictions specific to the colonia. Façades and roofs are refurbished, the existing openings are reordered and new ones are opened in the attic, and the aluminium joinery of the original construction is replaced with solid oak wood. A small attached structure that separated the kitchen from the back courtyard and the pool is removed, gaining a more fluid relationship between both spaces and a fuller reading of the house. The kitchen, installed in the former garage, recovers the original wooden trusses and is organised around an island of red Alicante stone aligned with the dining table, thus turned into the social hub of the house and a hinge between the two courtyards.

Original solution for the pool

The renovation of the pool is the most significant turn in the project. The iconic blue colour is abandoned in favour of a green that refers to the memory of the place and to architectures such as cisterns or reservoirs, ways of relating to water different from that of summer leisure. The basin is also resolved with a mobile platform of 6.60 x 2.60 metres that rises or descends over ground level. With this system the courtyard can be a terrace, a play area for children without the need for constant supervision, a shallow pond or a swimming pool for swimming. This seasonal transformation goes hand in hand with the optimisation of the old installations to improve water recirculation and with a naturalised treatment that addresses water scarcity and proposes other ways of understanding the health of the system. The old blue swimming pool, a fixed symbol of a particular society, thus becomes an active mechanism capable of taking part in the environmental management of the house.

Colour and memory

The overall colour palette responds to this same intention of giving the house density and memory, moving it away from the white abstraction in which the architects of Acebo x Alonso found it. Carriage green, present in much of the ironwork of the colonia, the terracotta of the decorative exposed-brick elements, beige as a neutral background and mustard –a residue of the original brass gilding– build what the studio describes as “a kind of resonant visual memory”, elements of the same colour dialogue with each other at different points in the house, even when the route between them is not direct. This atmosphere is joined by pieces such as the fireplace, which reinforce visual and thermal comfort, and furniture with a playful intent, with pieces such as the Drift Chair by Tornasol Studio, the Charmander coffee table by Guillermo Trapiello or the Cónica lamp by Casa Antillón.

Victoria Acebo and Ángel Alonso, architects responsible for the project, understand conservation and updating as complementary processes, not opposing ones, and have sought for the complete biography of this architecture –the working-class model of the twenties, the tourist fantasy of the seventies and the contemporary family home– to remain legible in the present-day house, without any of its layers having had to erase the previous one.

Project: La casa de la charca verde.
Location: Madrid.
Area: 150 m²
Completed: 2025.
Architecture: Acebo x Alonso.
Architects: Victoria Acebo y Ángel Alonso.
Photography: Germán Saiz.
Source: Acebo x Alonso.

Acebo x Alonso

Acebo X Alonso is the architecture studio founded by Victoria Acebo and Ángel Alonso in Madrid in 1996. Their work stems from a will to give specific answers to each project, without resorting to repeated formulas, and remains attentive both to the needs of the present and to the commitment to building a shared future. This way of understanding architecture unfolds across fields ranging from interior design to research, taking in design and architectural practice itself.

Victoria Acebo and Ángel Alonso combine their professional practice with teaching. Both are professors of Architectural Design at the Madrid School of Architecture (ETSAM), having also taught this subject at Universidad Europea de Madrid. Their academic experience extends as well to Washington University in St. Louis, in the case of Ángel Alonso, and to the Istituto Europeo di Design, in the case of Victoria Acebo.

Recognition of their joint work includes the National Young Architecture Award of the 9th Spanish Architecture and Urbanism Biennial (BEAU) for the MUNCYT in A Coruña, the 2017 FAD Interior Design Award and the 2018 COAM Award for the refurbishment of the Pontejos 9 building, as well as the Outreach Award of the 13th BEAU and a place as finalists in the 2016 FAD Awards for Thought and Criticism for their direction of the magazine Arquitectura. To this list is added the Architecture Award of the D’Achtall Observatory, in its sixth edition, and three nominations for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, the EUmies Awards.

Their work has been shown at MoMA in New York, as part of the exhibition On-Site: New Architecture in Spain, in the VIII and X Architecture Exhibitions of the Venice Biennale, at Tokyo Design Week and at Casa de la Arquitectura, and can be found in international publications such as El Croquis (issues 106-107, 119 and 136-137), Bauwelt (10/08 and 40-41/06) or Casabella (issue 810).

Victoria Acebo

Victoria Acebo is an architect from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and associate professor of Architectural Design at ETSAM since 2011. For eighteen years, between 2003 and 2021, she taught Architectural Design at the School of Architecture of Universidad Europea, and between 2023 and 2024 she supervised the Master’s Final Projects of the Master’s in Creative Direction for Retail at IED. She has directed aceboXalonso, the studio she founded together with Ángel Alonso, since 1996.

Ángel Alonso

Ángel Alonso (Santander 1966) completes his architecture degree in 1995 at ETSAM. A year later, in 1996, he founds the studio Acebo X Alonso together with Victoria Acebo. He has been associate professor at the Department of Architectural Design of ETSAM since 2013, currently within the Máster Habilitante, and was a professor of Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Universidad Europea de Madrid between 2003 and 2021, in addition to being Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis during the 2012-2013 academic year. He has served on Bachelor’s Final Project juries at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Universidad Europea, Universidad CEU San Pablo and Universidad de Alcalá, and has taken part as a guest at Columbia University (GSAPP) and at IE Arquitectura.

Together with Victoria Acebo he has directed the Summer Workshop of the XI BEAU, under the title Walden 2.0, vida o movilidad, and has been editor and director of the magazine Arquitectura of the Official Association of Architects of Madrid (issues 366 to 372), work that earned them the Outreach Award of the XIII BEAU and a place as finalists in the 2016 FAD Awards for Thought and Criticism, in its Face to Face conversations section.

He has been the winner, together with Victoria Acebo, of the competitions for the Centro de las Artes in A Coruña, the Recinto Ferial in Palma de Mallorca, La Cuña Verde -also in Palma de Mallorca- and the energy refurbishment of the Parliament of Cantabria in Santander. To his career are added the Veteco-Asefave 2008 award, also for the MUNCYT, and the Castilla y León Architecture Award, in its third edition, for Casa Terzagui. Among his nominations for the Mies van der Rohe Awards are Casa Varsavsky, the MUNCYT and Casa LC.

Project by Acebo X Alonso