The city’s domestic architecture responds to the climate. Houses are built with thick limewashed adobe walls, which hold the warmth of the day, clay-tile roofs with deep wooden eaves that protect against the rain, and corridors around a central courtyard. Towards the street, the house presents a sober façade, often painted in intense colours, with balconies and wooden doors. Life unfolds inside, around the courtyard, among plants, light and shade. This logic of retreat has shaped the city for almost five centuries.

San Cristóbal is also a meeting place. The Tseltal and Tsotsil communities of nearby municipalities, such as Chamula and Zinacantán, fill its markets every day with produce from the land and with textiles woven on backstrap looms, whose embroidery and colours identify each community. This cultural richness has drawn travellers, anthropologists, writers and artists for decades. Some stayed for good. Declared a Pueblo Mágico in 2003, the city combines colonial memory, indigenous cultures and a contemporary life in which creative work has a place of its own.

Casa Amona belongs to this tradition of houses inhabited by art and craft. It was designed by Colar Colectivo de Arquitectura and completed in 2025 on an urban plot next to one of the city’s main green areas. The house works almost as a statement of the practice’s principles: read the place carefully, negotiate every decision with those who will live in it, and build with what the region knows how to do well.

Discreet towards the street, intense towards the interior

The house keeps a discreet relationship with the street and unfolds its life towards the interior. There, carefully placed courtyards and openings create views in two directions: towards the landscape around the plot and between the rooms themselves. From the garden, the house reads as a sequence of white volumes of bold proportions, pierced by wooden windows with lattice screens. A blind wall rises above the roof as a crowning element, measuring the house against the sky. Beside it, a terrace with a timber structure and clay-tile roof looks out towards the hill.

The 155 square metres of built area are distributed over two levels, conceived as functionally independent units. The ground floor brings together the living room, dining room and kitchen in a continuous space, along with a full bathroom. A limewashed half-height wall, topped with a wooden rail, separates the areas without closing them off, and a cypress post marks the passage from one to the other. The layout allows the living room to become the main bedroom without major works. The house thus anticipates different conditions of use over time, a foresight that makes full sense in a home designed for several generations.

The first floor holds the private spaces: bedroom, study and terrace, all directly connected to the views of the hill. The study opens onto the terrace through a large opening that blurs the line between inside and outside. Cypress shelves run along the walls and step down to become a bench and a sideboard, and a desk sits in front of a window framed by the treetops.

A studio for artistic work

The project is completed by an independent 45-square-metre studio, devoted to artistic work and family gatherings. It also has its own bedroom and bathroom, which makes it self-sufficient. Its main space is a covered gallery, supported by an exposed brick pillar and a structure of timber beams, where a long cantilevered worktable runs along the wall. In front of it, brick steps rise towards the courtyard.

That courtyard is organised around an ash tree that already stood on the site. Preserving it was the starting point of the composition. Local vegetation and a small pond complete an urban microhabitat integrated into the whole, sheltered by tall earth-toned walls on which the tree casts its shadow throughout the day. The studio thus sits between two worlds: the retreat of creative work and the shared life of the courtyard, open to the family and to those who visit.

Masonry, exposed brick, adobe and cypress wood

The materials sustain this continuity. The project combines masonry, exposed brick, non-structural adobe and cypress wood. Wood plays an essential role: it forms the roofs, the joinery and all the built-in furniture, from the kitchen units to the bookshelves, the wardrobes and the bedroom headboard. The limewash, the wood and the clay-tile floors run from inside to outside without interruption, so that gallery, kitchen and terrace share the same skin. These are materials from the region, worked by local trades, and their choice reflects the practice’s ethical conviction of building an architecture that ages with dignity, that accepts patina and use, and that gains character over the years.

A house named after a grandmother

Amona means grandmother in Basque. The name arises from a personal circumstance and gives meaning to the whole project, designed so that everyday family life and artistic creation can coexist. Few words better describe a house conceived for the long term, one that makes room for those who arrive and those who remain.

The lead architect, Santiago Constantino De Angoitia, was also the builder. This double responsibility can be seen in the details, such as the precise meeting of wood and lime, the joints of the brickwork and the proportion of each opening. The project was resolved on site as much as in the office, with the same attention to place that Colar champions in every project.

In the end, Casa Amona recovers what San Cristóbal has taught for centuries: a house that is discreet towards the street and saves its intensity for the interior. At its heart, instead of a colonial fountain, there is an ash tree, and beneath it a studio where people work with their hands. When the mist comes down from the hill and slips between the walls, the house is still there, limewashed and warm, ready to grow old alongside those who live in it.

Project: Casa Amona.
Location: San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.
Programme: single-family house with studio.
Built area: 155 m².
Completed: 2025.
Architecture: Colar Colectivo de Arquitectura.
Lead architect: Santiago Constantino De Angoitia.
Team: Santiago Constantino De Angoitia, Maximiliano Animas Rueda, Mateo Torres Sánchez, Roberto Marroquín Polín.
Structural engineering: Virgilio Domínguez.
Landscape: Terruño Paisaje.
Construction: Santiago Constantino De Angoitia.
Photography: Ariadna Polo.
Source: Colar Colectivo de Arquitectura.

Colar. Colectivo de arquitectura

Colar Colectivo de Arquitectura was founded in Mexico City in 2021 by Santiago Constantino, Maximiliano Animas, Mateo Torres and Roberto Marroquín. All four trained at the Faculty of Architecture of UNAM and chose to make collaboration more than a working method: a way of understanding the discipline. Paulina Animas joined in 2025. Before founding the collective, its members completed their education with academic stays in Rosario, Madrid, Seville and Berlin. They also worked at practices such as Ignacio Urquiza Arquitectos, Rzero, Dos Puntos Arquitectura, HUBER, TLR-AU, Escobedo Soliz, Talleresque and the studio of Nicolás Campodónico, on housing, urban and landscape projects across a wide range of scales.

From that shared trajectory emerges an unusual structure. It is a distributed studio, able to operate across several territories at once and to draw on what the collective itself calls “situated knowledge”. Decisions are made horizontally, through ongoing dialogue between the team, the clients and those who will inhabit the spaces. Its members acknowledge that this process generates a certain friction, and they embrace it as part of the craft: each project is refined through that negotiation until it reaches a more rigorous response, more attentive to place. In the face of the economic, political and socio-environmental constraints of contemporary practice, design is approached as a synthesis of spatial strategy, material system and context.

Their built work is spread mainly across Mexico City, Chiapas, Hidalgo, Morelos and the State of Mexico. It spans housing, from private commissions to experimental domestic typologies, as well as renovation and restoration, ephemeral architecture, landscape, hospitality and furniture design. Among their most notable projects are Morada de Piedra (2024), in Malinalco; Casa Amona (2025) and Casa Estelí (2026), in San Cristóbal de las Casas; and the Pabellón Cempasúchil (2025) and the recent Casa Caliza (2026), both in Tulancingo. Their work has been published in outlets such as Dezeen, Dwell, Architectural Digest, Arquine, Metalocus and ArchDaily.

Nečín is a territory of second lives. The smooth rock walls preserve the trace of labour, but their use has changed completely, and what was once extraction is now landscape and meeting place. This logic of slow transformation, in which each stage is layered over the previous one and leaves it visible, also runs through the small house that the Prague studio Facha architekti has renovated and extended on the edge of the village.

A house that grows in layers

The history of the building is one of almost organic growth. Originally, the plot contained a single-storey stable, on top of which someone later built a simple weekend cabin. Over the years, that cabin was gradually adapted until it became a permanent home, and each change left its mark on walls and ceilings. Its current owners, a family of four, friends of the studio, needed more living space, a real relationship with the garden and somewhere to keep the objects of domestic life that were already overflowing the house.

The architects took that process of growth as their starting point. The house sits on the edge of the village, among detached houses and scattered former agricultural buildings, and the extension was designed as one more layer in its development, clearly distinct in form and material, which allows the history of the building to remain legible.

The new volume is attached to the whitewashed façade like a body at once foreign and familiar. Two prisms of different heights, joined by an inclined plane that evokes the slope of a roof, clad in corrugated sheet metal of an intense red. The taller one lifts off the ground on slender supports and seems suspended above the garden. Corrugated sheet metal was chosen as a simple, durable and affordable material, which the team itself could install and which gives the intervention an unmistakably contemporary identity.

To the west, a large sliding window opens the living room onto a larch terrace with generous steps that serve as seating, shaded by a textile awning in the same red. The lower volume houses the new main entrance, and this relocation of the access made it possible to reorganise the original layout, enlarge the bathroom and redesign the kitchen. The built-in cupboards in the extension finally resolve the need for storage.

The intervention reaches the whole house

The basement and attic remain almost untouched, while the raised ground floor is completely reconfigured. The original building received thermal insulation, new timber windows, a corrugated metal roof whose silver grey enters into dialogue with the red of the extension, and an air-source heat pump. Inside, pine plywood shapes the custom-made furniture, dark natural linoleum unifies the floors, a rotating wood-burning stove occupies a corner next to the kitchen and the bathroom is finished in cement plaster.

Within the extension, pine plywood lines the walls and ceiling, and its pronounced grain continues across built-in benches, cupboards and a small round table. It is a warm, enveloping space, open to the garden, that extends the dining room through a wide opening in the original wall. In the kitchen, the red worktop brings the colour of the façade indoors.

Architecture is offered here as a support for a family’s everyday life, attentive to its gestures rather than to its own image, as the photographs show: an inhabited house, with books and records, paintings on the walls, plants on every windowsill, bentwood chairs in red and black around the table, and a dog keeping watch over the garden from the entrance.

Design and build

The most singular aspect of the project lies in the way it was made. As in other works by the studio, Facha architekti designed the extension and built it together with its owners, from the timber structure to the façade and the interior linings. The images of the construction tell it better than any project description. The framework of studs raised on a summer evening, the yellow battens over the waterproof membrane, the first red profiles framing openings and corners, the architects on the scaffolding fixing the sheet metal in the depths of winter.

For the studio, this direct involvement is an inseparable part of its practice. In small, unconventional projects, it allows them to resolve details and construction solutions for which it is difficult to find contractors, and it gives them a knowledge of materials, techniques and craft that feeds every new commission. The architects explain it clearly: being physically involved in the building process “creates opportunities to refine the design through countless details and decisions that simply cannot be anticipated in front of a computer”.

Years ago, Martin Chlanda spoke of architecture as “social sculpture”, a practice that works as much on form as on the relationships between those who make it possible. In Nečín, both ideas meet. A house extended among friends, in which architects and owners shared tools, cold and decisions.

Perhaps it is the right place for it. In a village whose memory belongs to the stonecutters, who knew stone intimately because they worked it, this small group of young architects champions a similar knowledge, learned through direct contact with material. And like those quarries that keep the marks of labour while water turns them into something else, the house preserves the traces of the stable, the cabin and the successive repairs, and now adds a red layer that, in all likelihood, will not be the last either.

Project: House With a Red Addition
Location: Nečín, Příbram district (Czech Republic)
Architecture: Facha architekti — Martin Chlanda, Andrea Sobotková, Matěj Nepustil, Jana Fischerová, Nikola Gronychová.
Completed: 2025.
Built-up area: 50 m² (house) + 26 m² (extension).
Gross floor area: 154 m² (house) + 26 m² (extension).
Plot: 515 m².
Photography: Peter Fabo.
Collaborators and suppliers:
Timber structure of the extension and finishing work: Facha architekti. Masonry: Jaroslav Kozohorsky.
Windows: Cadre.
Joinery: Panab, Eman Trefný.
Upholstery: Polstrin, A-ACTU.
Lighting: Artemide.
Chairs and table: Ton.
Linoleum: DLW Colorette, by Gerflor.

Facha architekti

Facha architekti is an architecture studio founded in Prague in 2018 by Jana Fischerová, Martin Chlanda and Matěj Nepustil, joined in 2020 by the artist and designer Andrea Sobotková, completing the current team. They work from a studio in an inner courtyard in the Smíchov district, and the name already announces a way of understanding the craft, in colloquial Czech, facha is work, toil. The founders met at the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University (ČVUT), and part of their roots lies in the Povětroň studio, where they began to share a common outlook on Czech rural architecture and the search for its character.

Each arrived by a path of their own. Martin trained at a school of arts and crafts in Český Krumlov specialising in the restoration of historic buildings. He later spent three years in the interdisciplinary studio of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, an experience that dismantled the prejudices of his earlier training and brought him closer to the contemporary art of Gordon Matta-Clark, Pierre Huyghe or Francis Alÿs. Matěj grew up observing the evolution of contemporary architecture through his father, also an architect, while Jana, the daughter of an architect, sat the faculty’s entrance exams almost as a trial run that ended up becoming a vocation. Andrea’s arrival strengthened an inclination present from the outset, the dialogue with art, which the studio also cultivates in installations for public space made with artist friends.

Their references combine the precision of Peter Zumthor and the Swiss and Austrian tradition with the deliberate rawness of Arno Brandlhuber or Jan De Vylder, but their closest source lies in their own territory. The vernacular architecture and anonymous self-building of Czech villages, they consider a heritage as fertile as the international magazines that fill their shelves. Hence their interest in transforming what already exists, from historic buildings to ordinary houses from the second half of the 20th century.

The small scale is a conscious choice. Single-family homes and seasonal retreats offer them creative freedom and, above all, a close and lasting relationship with those who will inhabit them. Within the team, sensibilities complement one another: Martin and Jana have the ability to imprint the character of its owners on each house, while Matěj leans towards more general solutions, attentive above all to the surroundings. Martin sums up this ethic in the idea that a well-designed house is an imprint of the person who lives in it, and he borrows from Joseph Beuys the notion of “social sculpture”: beyond the built form, each work should cultivate relationships with the client and with those who work on it, and end in friendship.

The building site is the studio’s other natural habitat. Its members alternate between the computer and construction, convinced that combining intellectual and physical work is a healthy way of thinking about architecture, and that contact with the landscape and with people outside their own circle enriches the project. That early aspiration to carry out at least one work a year with their own hands has become an established part of their practice, especially in small projects whose unconventional details are difficult to entrust to others. Works such as the house in Kořenov, between the Jizera Mountains and the Krkonoše, or The Box in the Barn, a seasonal retreat inserted into a barn in eastern Bohemia, have brought them international exposure, and the renovation of an apartment next to Prague’s Old Town Square was nominated in 2025 for the Czech Grand Design awards. With an eye also on public space, small urban ensembles and models of collective housing such as Baugruppen, Facha architekti holds that the generosity of a building is independent of its size, that intuition and passion often weigh more than exact parameters, and that in every building form, structure and material coexist with the people and stories that sustain it.

The paths leading out of the village cross dry-farmed fields, carob and olive trees held in place by stone terrace walls. It is a landscape built with whatever was at hand, in which every wall explains its origin and its function. That same logic, that of an architecture that shows what it is made of, runs through Casa Arlo, the single-family house designed by architects Luis Royon Barea and Andreu Arévalo Llàcer in one of Creixell’s residential areas.

A prism on the slope

The house, with 310 square metres of built area, presents itself as a prism of sharp edges and clean geometry that settles carefully onto the terrain. The level of the ground floor coincides with the centre of gravity of the plot, a decision that keeps alterations to the natural profile to a minimum. The setbacks set by planning regulations define the building’s footprint, and the result is a white monolith that captures the shifts of Mediterranean light throughout the day.

Large openings with natural timber frames punctuate this smooth façade, introducing a warm counterpoint and connecting the interior with its surroundings. As evening falls and the house is lit from within, these openings become the most eloquent feature of the volume.

The meeting with the ground is resolved through an exposed concrete plinth that absorbs the change in level. Above it, the free strip surrounding the house is given over to outdoor use. In the corner opposite the entrance, where the geometry of the plot offers more room and better sun exposure, a timber deck holds a swimming pool of simple lines. Beside it, a light pergola covered with reed matting filters the sun and casts a shifting pattern of shadows onto the glazing, in the manner of the traditional vine arbours of the coast. Even the stair that climbs the garden terraces is built with the same ceramic blocks used inside, laid so that their perforations remain visible on every tread.

Structure as finish

The character of the work springs from a constructive decision that the architects have sought to express throughout the project: each material is shown as it is and fulfils a recognisable function. The above-ground structure is resolved almost entirely with precast concrete elements, a modular system that brings metric order, economy of means and an aesthetic of industrial roots. This dry assembly coexists with the basement, where the retaining walls are built in cast-in-place reinforced concrete. The basement resists the thrust of the ground and also works as a technical podium, housing the parking and the building services.

Inside, the palette is reduced to three materials. The vertical enclosures leave the Termoarcilla thermal clay block exposed, its ribbed texture providing a constant geometric vibration, a terracotta tone that brings warmth to the spaces and considerable thermal inertia. Against this rough surface, concrete appears raw in columns and slabs, bearing the marks of the formwork and the weight of its presence. The continuous timber floor completes the ensemble and restores the domestic scale. The architects speak of a “warm brutalism”, and the expression describes precisely an atmosphere in which material austerity produces, paradoxically, a sense of welcome.

The services run exposed, their white conduits travelling across walls and ceilings, and the pine furniture, the bookcases full of books and the rattan lamps extend that same honesty to the scale of the object.

The void that orders the house

The entrance has been shifted towards the west façade, where the difference in level with the street is smaller and the arrival can happen gently. A contained hallway, separated from the workspace by a lattice of timber slats, prepares the passage into the day area, which opens all at once as a large continuous platform. The kitchen, resolved with smooth white fronts and wood-finish worktops, is organised around an island that faces the rest of the floor and encourages shared life along the longitudinal axis of the house.

The true spatial engine appears beside the central vertical circulation core: a double-height space that holds the living room and the library and links the two main floors. This void expands the perception of space and also acts as a thermal and light regulator, as the upper windows carry daylight to the far end of the ground floor. Here the architecture responds to precise passive criteria. Facing openings allow cross ventilation, and the orientation ensures that winter sun enters the main living room directly between ten and twelve, solar time, around the solstice.

The concrete stair connecting the floors is lightened by its enclosure, a white net-like metal mesh that protects without interrupting the passage of light. Seen from the living room, the stair seems suspended within a translucent veil.

Inhabiting the gallery

On the upper floor, the corridor works as a gallery that looks over the living room through large timber-framed glazed panels. From here the double height can be taken in at a glance, so that the private area, with two bedrooms and a small outdoor balcony, shares in the generosity of the common space. Light and views cross the house from end to end, and the daily life of the ground floor remains present upstairs as well.

The bedrooms keep the serene tone of the whole. In the main bedroom, a canopy bed draped in light fabric, a double washbasin on a bamboo countertop with round mirrors suspended from timber posts, and a shower clad in concrete pieces compose an open and fluid space. In the children’s room, the ceramic block is painted white and retains its texture, while a low timber bed, low-height shelves and a swing hung from the slab turn the structure into a support for play. It is in these details that the house reveals its most valuable quality: an architecture designed to accompany a family life that grows, changes and occupies space in its own way.

A house made of the essential

Casa Arlo shows that material restraint can be a form of generosity. With a reduced palette and everyday construction elements, the project achieves an expressiveness that stems from proportion, from structural order and from the care with which each piece is allowed to show itself. The tension between the precast system and the singular experience of inhabiting gives the house its particular calm. Like the stone terrace walls that order the fields of Creixell, the house explains itself through its construction, and in that clarity it finds its beauty.

Project: Casa Arlo
Location: Creixell (Tarragona).
Built area: 310 m².
Completed: 2025.
Architecture: Luis Royon Barea and Andreu Arévalo Llàcer.
Photography: Lluís Bort i Cerezo.
Source: Lluís Bort.

Luis Royon Barea

Luis Royon Barea qualified as an architect at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Reus (Universitat Rovira i Virgili) in 2017, and a year later founded his own studio in Tarragona, LRB_arquitectura. Since then he has taken on commissions of varied scale and nature across residential, commercial and rehabilitation work, guiding each project through every stage: from concept and design to site management and technical coordination.

Alongside this, since 2021 he has worked as a valuation architect for officially approved appraisal companies, among them Gloval, a role that has led him to handle more than five hundred cases a year. This constant contact with real homes, with their recurring problems and with the people who live in them, has refined a way of working grounded in anticipation and direct dealing. Royon sees architecture as a close, personal service, sustained by clear explanations and by the conviction that every client should understand, step by step, the decisions that shape their home.

Andreu Arévalo Llacer

Andreu Arévalo Llàcer trained at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Reus (Universitat Rovira i Virgili), where he graduated in 2013 with highest honours (Matrícula de Honor). His student years were shaped by collective and experimental work: he took part in teams such as Solar Decathlon and Build Our Nation, in workshops including “La ciutat Mediterrània” and one held at EMBT, and was a member of the BON group at the 2012 Venice Biennale.

After early steps in urban planning and rehabilitation, he steered his career towards conceptual design and architectural visualisation, first as an independent professional and as a partner at Arquitectura Beta, and later with Beta Imagery, the studio he founded in 2017 and has led ever since. He works with architecture practices and builders on the conceptualisation and definition of landscape, interior and residential projects.

His approach to design rests on a firm conviction: the concept is the soul of the work, and the challenge lies in keeping it intact as the technical complexity of its construction grows. Arévalo seeks a dialogue in which the idea and its constraints nourish one another, giving rise to spaces that reconcile character and pragmatism, depth and lightness.

“The commission came about because of a chair”, recalls Maria Just. The client came to her studio in Vilafranca interested in a model by the firm Vergés, and from that conversation about an object grew, over time, a broader trust that led to this project: renovating the house where he had grown up, to live in it now with his wife and young children. Casa MC is, therefore, a project of continuity, a home passing from one generation to the next that had to do so while preserving its character and identity.

Recovered wood

From the outset, designer and client shared the idea of a contemporary, warm and timeless house, in which the existing architecture would be complemented by a careful selection of materials and furniture. Wood became the central argument, and the first gesture was to recover what was already there. The original doors, frames and joinery were stripped, some on site and others in the workshop, until the patina of stain and varnish that had darkened them over the years was removed. Beneath those layers emerged a light-toned, luminous wood that now visually links the rooms and holds, in every frame, the memory of the family home.

On this recovered base, the new elements unfold. All the bespoke furniture and the kitchen, designed by Maria Just, were made in natural oak by Fusteria Ramon Cornellà, a workshop in Moja, just a few kilometres from the studio. Storage walls, benches, steps and the kitchen bar, clad in vertical slats that follow its curved end, extend the same material, so that wood ceases to be a finish and becomes the very structure of the domestic narrative. For the flooring, after much debate, a porcelain stoneware by Marazzi was chosen that reproduces oak with remarkable fidelity. A practical decision, designed for life with young children, that keeps the chromatic continuity of the whole intact.

The patio, heart of the house

The day area is organised around the different levels of the original house. Solid oak steps resolve the changes in height between the entrance hall, living room and dining room, creating distinct atmospheres that share light and views. The house thus reads as a continuous sequence, in which each space can be sensed from the one before.

At the heart of the floor plan, an interior patio receives overhead light through a skylight. Its planter, finished with sand-toned ceramic pieces, gathers indoor plants on a bed of white pebbles and acts as the green lung of the entire home. Beside it rises the original staircase, which regains its prominence as one of the most recognisable architectural elements of the house, with wooden handrails and trims that connect it to the rest of the interior. At its foot, a built-in bench and the TMM floor lamp by Miguel Milá for Santa & Cole form a reading corner that reveals one of the designer’s affinities: the Catalan modernity of Milá and Coderch, and their way of understanding design as simplicity in the service of life.

Around the fire

The fireplace occupies a prominent place in the project. Built into the wall and accompanied by a horizontal piece in Dekton Adia by Cosentino, which serves as a ledge, it becomes the centre around which the entire day area unfolds, together with the kitchen and dining room. The ceilings, traced by curved lines, soften the boundaries between spaces and accompany the movement of light.

The kitchen combines oak units with glazed display cabinets and smooth stone-toned fronts, with worktop and splashback in the same Adia porcelain surface. In the dining room, the Leiho table by Treku gathers around it the Bogart chairs by Manel Molina for Vergés, with rush seats, which are repeated as stools at the bar. The object that gave rise to the commission thus takes its place where the family gathers.

The furniture follows the same restraint: Bali sofas by Grupo Tessuto in oat-coloured linen, wooden armchairs with light upholstery, the Greta lamp by Gabriel Teixidó for Carpyen and a lithograph by Eduardo Chillida that converses serenely with the architecture. Decorative objects appear sparingly, letting the house breathe. In the study, a large storage wall and a sturdy natural oak desk maintain the order that a family with young children needs.

Abundant natural light filters through wooden slatted blinds that regulate sunlight and privacy. Beyond their function, they draw shifting patterns of light across floors and walls throughout the day and enhance the warmth of the interior, as if the house itself were marking the passing of the hours.

A house that endures

Casa MC speaks of what endures. Of a home that returns to the family who lived in it, of a wood that recovers its colour once what time had added is removed, and of a craft, that of local carpentry, that gives shape to every bespoke piece. In a territory that lives to the rhythm of the grape harvest, Maria Just has worked the way the land is worked in the Penedès: removing what is superfluous, caring for what remains and trusting time to do the rest.

Project: Casa MC.
Location: Les Cabanyes, Alt Penedès (Barcelona).
Completed: 2026.
Interior design: Maria Just Interiorisme.
Technical architecture: Josep Maria Ferrando.
Photography: Meritxell Arjalaguer.
Joinery and bespoke furniture: Fusteria Ramon Cornellà.
Aluminium windows and enclosures: Vialta.
Construction / Masonry / Flooring: Jaume Balcells.
Electrical, lighting and climate control: Carles Vallès.
Painting: Toni Ramos.
Flooring and wall finishes: FECA, Marazzi.
Kitchen: diseño de Maria Just en roble natural; encimera y frontales en Dekton Adia de Cosentino.
Furniture: Entrance hall. TMM floor lamp by Miguel Milá for Santa & Cole. Living room. Bali sofas in oat-coloured linen by Grupo Tessuto. Greta table lamp by Gabriel Teixidó for Carpyen. Lithograph by Eduardo Chillida. Dining room and kitchen. Leiho table by Treku. Bogart rush chairs and stools by Manel Molina for Vergés.

Maria Just

Although her initial academic path was in Political Science, Maria Just soon discovered her true calling in interior design. After studying at Elisava, she began her professional career in 2005 at Raimon Parera’s studio, which specialized in projects for the fashion, hospitality, and residential sectors. It was there that she found her affinity for domestic spaces—an interest that dated back to childhood, when she spent hours rearranging furniture and devouring her mother’s interior design magazines: Ambiente, Nuevo Estilo…

Today, she leads her own studio, Maria Just Interiorisme, in Vilafranca del Penedès, where she develops warm, timeless, and deeply personal projects. Her style is defined by a blend of minimalism and warmth, with special attention to natural materials and the architectural context.

Maria steers clear of fleeting trends and excess. She draws inspiration from Catalan modernist architecture, from figures such as Coderch and Milá, and from international designers like Marcio Kogan and John Pawson. She believes that in recent years, our homes have become the epicenters of our lives, and that design should foster comfort, connection, and openness.

For her, each project is a new beginning. A gift she approaches with respect, enthusiasm, and the same passion for design that first led her down this path. “Ten years from now,” she says, “I see myself enjoying my work just as much as I do today—with the same excitement I felt when I started.”

This approach is now outdated. Contemporary housing recognises ever more clearly that ages with different needs live together under one roof, and that living together improves when each finds its own space. To the old separation between the shared and the intimate is thus added a second boundary, subtler and perhaps more revealing, the one that distinguishes the universe of adults from that of children. What Pia Capdevila proposes in this project is to give each generation a place made to its measure within a home that is still shared. For the parents, a serene, sociable floor open to the outside. For the children, a territory with its own rules, where play, study and rest are ordered with an autonomy rarely found in domestic layouts.

The duplex that Pia Capdevila has renovated in Barcelona makes that second boundary the argument of the entire project. The ground floor brings together the social life of the house and the main suite, and the upper floor is given over entirely to the children. Between the two, a new staircase acts as a threshold between two ways of living that nonetheless share the same material language.

The original home was fragmented into closed rooms, crossed by narrow corridors and forced circulation routes. It resolved the relationship between its two levels with a poorly placed staircase that hindered more than it connected. The interior designer decided to begin precisely there. Relocating and redesigning the vertical circulation was the strategic operation from which the new hierarchy of uses derived. Once where and how one goes upstairs had been resolved, each floor could take on a precise identity and the whole house found its order.

The adults’ floor

On the ground floor, what was once a succession of closed rooms, entrance hall, kitchen, living room and a bedroom, has been transformed into a single social space where kitchen, dining and living areas coexist without barriers. The opening up enlarges the perception of space and, above all, allows the light that floods the living room terrace to cross the home until it reaches the entrance of the house. Now, on entering the home, a hallway opens onto the kitchen, with a wooden console, which marks the welcome and a divider unit of open shelving, which screens but lets the light through.

The kitchen, open, retains an identity of its own. A continuous storage wall, floor to ceiling, brings together the oven and microwave column, the sink area, the breakfast unit and general storage. A central island concentrates the hob and the main work surface, leads naturally towards the dining room and orders the space without the need for partitions. The fronts in English green, combined with wood finishes, add depth and converse with the warmth of the oak laminate flooring by Neoparquet, which runs through both floors as the connecting thread of the whole house.

The dining room occupies the natural passage between the kitchen and the living room, and that intermediate position reinforces the sequence of the space. Cooking, enjoying the table and conversation form part of the same story.

The living room is organised around a large sofa facing the terrace, attentive to everyday comfort and to the visual relationship with the outside. A custom-designed TV unit, which incorporates the fireplace, acts as a fixed piece that orders the room. Beside it, an armchair by Andreu World defines a small reading corner within the living area.

The terrace is experienced as a true extension of the living room. A pergola allows it to be used all year round. The project carries out to it the same chromatic atmosphere as the interior, made of greens, stone and earth tones, with microcement finishes that give a sober, homogeneous image.

The parents’ private space

On the other side of the kitchen begins the most private part of the floor. The corridor leading to the main bedroom incorporates a large floor-to-ceiling wardrobe that makes use of the space under the stairs and serves a dual function: it extends the storage supporting the kitchen and houses the laundry area. It thus compactly resolves an important domestic need without adding separate service rooms.

The suite’s bedroom has been built from a serene palette and a careful layering of textures with walls in sand-toned stucco, textiles and upholstery that answer one another and a custom-designed headboard. A private terrace increases the entry of natural light and extends the bedroom towards the outside.

In the bathroom, a wide countertop with two rounded washbasins faces a shower of generous dimensions. The space is built from a dialogue between the soft greens of the ceramic wall and the textiles, the sand tones of cladding and countertop, and the black counterpoint of taps and frames. A sliding door in translucent glass lets the light from the bedroom reach the inside of the bathroom.

The staircase as threshold

In that same stretch stands the new staircase, the decision on which the entire project rests. Its relocation and new layout make moving from one floor to the other more comfortable, but its true scope is conceptual. The element that once hindered life in the house has become the threshold that separates and at the same time unites the world of adults and that of children. Going upstairs means changing territory.

The children’s territory

The upper floor belongs entirely to the children, and its attic character is embraced as a trait of identity. The geometry of the roof, with its slopes and corners, offers a scale closer to childhood and makes each space singular. Several roof windows opened at strategic points multiply the entry of natural light and compensate for the slope of the ceiling with a bright, open feeling.

At the top of the stairs a play and rest area, equipped with floor mattresses and low furniture, functions as a small living room made to the children’s measure, a flexible place to lie down, play or get together with friends.

Close by is the bathroom the siblings share, which concentrates the floor’s service fixtures and eases everyday routines. The study area occupies a central position, between the staircase and the way to the bedrooms. A large desk with storage and an upper unit of open shelving keep the workspace tidy and allow the bedrooms to remain free of that function. Wood and ochre yellow introduce a livelier note here, creating an atmosphere that is stimulating and at the same time restrained.

Before reaching the rooms, the hallway houses a shared dressing room. The solution frees up space inside the bedrooms, which are devoted to rest and personal life. It also concentrates storage in an intermediate piece that makes efficient use of the junctions with the roof, something especially valuable on a floor of such complex geometry.

The two children’s bedrooms respond to the singularity of the attic and to the wish to give each one its own identity within a shared language. Both include a reading corner, which makes them rooms for spending time in as well as for sleeping. Colour establishes a subtle variation between them: in one, green is the base and terracotta the accent, and in the other the relationship is reversed. The result is a visual narrative that is coherent between the two rooms and, at the same time, very personal.

Two territories, one house

The most valuable aspect of this project lies in the way the layout is placed at the service of a way of living together. The house is now lived by generations. Downstairs, adult life finds calm, light and a close relationship with the outside. Upstairs, the children have a place that belongs to them, where they can grow up with a certain autonomy while still feeling close. The oak of the floor, the greens and the earth tones that run through both floors are a reminder that this separation is, above all, a form of care, and that the two worlds remain part of the same home.

Project: Comprehensive renovation of a family duplex.
Type: Urban home.
Location: Avda. Roma. Barcelona.
Area: 160 m².
Completed: 2026.
Scope: Interior design and decoration project.
Interior design and decoration: Pia Capdevila Interiorismo.
Photography: Jordi Canosa.
Styling: Mar Gausachs.
Source: MasMedia. Marta Alonso.

Pia Capdevila

Pia Capdevila belongs to a generation of interior designers who have been able to interpret the contemporary home through sensitivity and everyday experience. Born into a family connected to architecture, her vocation for built space arose naturally, understanding from a very young age that the home is much more than a functional place: it is the setting of life, of intimacy and of memory. See full biography.

More than 1,200 exhibiting firms, ten pavilions and a surface area of over 110,000 square metres turn the venue into a temporary map of contemporary design, where international brands, manufacturers, textile publishers, kitchen companies and ceramic firms coexist. The figure impresses, but the real change lies in the itinerary: for the first time, professionals can discover new furniture collections, select textiles, review kitchen proposals, explore ceramic surfaces or research emerging materials in a single place, without moving from one trade fair to another.

That continuity also carries over into the event’s own ephemeral architecture: for the first time, all the common areas answer to a single creative direction, in the hands of the studio Odosdesign, which builds a shared visual narrative for the gathering as a whole.

A hotel conceived as the navel of the world

The project that best sums up this global outlook is Hotel Hábitat 2026, the immersive installation signed this year by Mexican architect Joaquín Homs, following the editions by Héctor Ruiz in 2024 and Tomás Alía in 2025. Homs does not propose an exhibition space, but an architectural and emotional reflection on the act of inhabiting: a “universal hotel, a place capable of belonging simultaneously to the sea, the mountain, the desert or the city”, as his studio explains. The reference is an ancient one — the “navel of the world”, the point where numerous cosmologies place the meeting of sky, earth and underworld — and it translates into almost 550 square metres organised from stillness: a white atmosphere intervened by natural materials, mineral textures, sands and woods in organic tones, and a pond with a central garden that acts as the ensemble’s inner breath. Above that landscape rises a vertical element in cobalt blue, a symbol of the connection between earth and sky, while a wall built from blocks of natural straw seeks to “activate the visitor’s sensory memory through the texture, the scent and the warmth of the material”, turned into a statement on sustainability and the recovery of ancestral techniques. Homs, with more than forty years of career and projects for Grupo Vidanta and Grupo Mayan in the Riviera Maya — among them the interior design of the first permanent Cirque du Soleil theatre outside Canada — brings together here interior design studios and Spanish habitat firms with international reach in what he defines as “a great choral project” to redefine how we inhabit the present.

The generational handover takes over the Salón nude

If Hotel Hábitat looks towards sensory experience, the Salón nude has for more than twenty years sustained the fair’s other great commitment: emerging talent. The 2026 edition brings together fifteen proposals — six emerging professionals and studios and nine schools and training centres — selected by a jury of broad professional and institutional standing, made up of Henar Díez, of the Centro de Coordinación de Industrias Culturales del Ministerio de Cultura; Ángela Montagud and Jordi Iranzo, of Clap Studio, a studio distinguished with the 2023 National Design Award; multidisciplinary designer Ester Cruz, a participant in several editions of nude; Clara del Portillo, co-founder of Yonoh Estudio Creativo and historically linked to the show; and Javier Pastor, designer, researcher and professor at the Universitat Politècnica de València.

In the Emerging Professionals category, nude 2026 will feature six participants: Somos Jumat, by Juan Pedro Gutiérrez Giracca; faBle.xyz, by Moisés Lázaro; Kaimok Design, by Prospero Risiglione; Bam Furniture Design, made up of Benoit Paul Huguenin, Ana Cristina Chavez Martinez and Maitu Green; Archivo Carmenati, by Nicolau Furriol Carmenati; and Melón de ideas, by Yolanda Pérez and María José Manzano.

As for the schools, participants will include Barreira Arte y Diseño, with Click; Universitat Jaume I, with Naturaleza que cuida con sentido; Escola d’Art i Superior de Disseny de València, with Projectes alumnat 2026; Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Aeroespacial y Diseño Industrial, with NU2, with Yudesign; Escola d’Art i Superior de Ceràmica de Manises, with Territorios cerámicos; Elisava, Facultad de Diseño e Ingeniería; Escuela Superior de Enseñanzas Técnicas de la Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera; Centro de Referencia Nacional en Producción, Carpintería y Mueble de Andalucía; and Anáhuac Puebla (México), with the work Rethinking the Past, Rethinking the Pattern.

It is worth noting that Anáhuac Puebla’s participation also reinforces nude’s international dimension and the connection of its talent platform with new design centres and schools across Latin America.

Four days of professional conversation

The activities programme organises the gathering around three stages that function as chapters of a single conversation. Ágora nude addresses innovation and the values of contemporary design — it opens with the Jornada de los Premios Nacionales de Innovación y Diseño and hosts the presentation of Tiempo + Materia, the project by the Fundació del Disseny de la Comunitat Valenciana that champions craft as a bridge between tradition and innovation. The Foro Hotel Hábitat carries that reflection into the contract sector, with talks on hotel design and brand experience. And the Foro AMC Kitchen Lab, set within the space designed by Francesc Rifé, places the kitchen as one of the great centres of contemporary life, with one especially anticipated moment: the conversation between chef Martín Berasategui and former basketball player Fernando Romay on food, rest and wellbeing. Alongside all this comes the materials installation by Matter, conceived to touch and understand how new materials are transforming the project, and the proposal by Andreu World, which once again turns its exhibition into a manifesto on innovation, sustainability and the culture of the project.

With the Salón EXCO joining the fair’s professional agenda for the first time, and the parallel programme of València Design Fest, the whole city joins this week dedicated to design. València Inspira Diseño proposes, with Feria Hábitat València as its driving force, a single language for thinking about habitat, capable of sustaining both commercial ambition and reflection on how we want to live.

It is in this context that Sa Casa arrives, the project with which Stefano Boeri Architetti has won the competition launched in Ibiza by the Entidad Estatal de Vivienda, Casa 47, the Spanish public entity dedicated to the management and development of affordable housing. The commission comprises close to a hundred and ninety below-market-rate rental homes, distributed across four volumes and built entirely with a prefabricated timber system, designed to adapt over time to the needs of its residents and to remain in constant dialogue with the community, nature and the city.

Modularity, the principle that organises the entire project

Modularity is not an added technical resource here, but the principle that organises the entire project. The buildings will be built in CLT, cross-laminated timber made up of crossed layers, prefabricated off-site and assembled directly on the plot: a dry, fast and precise system that reduces construction time, waste and impact on the surroundings. That same constructive logic defines the architectural grammar of the complex and allows the homes to be reconfigured over time, meeting universal accessibility criteria and accommodating, within a single flexible typology, young people, older residents, families and people with reduced mobility.

“The Ibiza project is strategic for the future of European cities because it proposes a model of affordable housing that uses timber prefabrication based on a modular system that can be adapted to different contexts. Green, timber, modular and universally accessible residential architecture represents the real major response for public urban regeneration policies”, comments architect Stefano Boeri.

The same principle of flexibility carries through to the shared workspaces and communal areas, where the boundary between private and collective can be redrawn without altering the identity of the complex. The decision to break the programme into four volumes, rather than resolve it in a single block, frees up a central green space that acts as the heart of community life while keeping the complex permeable and open to its surroundings. Native vegetation runs through the buildings and shapes courtyards, pathways and a central public square, within a continuous system of open spaces designed to encourage encounter. That greenery climbs up to the roofs of the residential blocks and becomes a fully fledged ecological infrastructure: it provides shade, creates new habitats, helps improve air quality and mitigates the urban heat island effect, while photovoltaic panels, studied orientation, natural ventilation and water management systems complete the project’s energy strategy.

Sa Casa, a contemporary model of accessible housing

Sa Casa thus joins a contemporary model of accessible below-market-rate rental housing, where architecture, technology and nature coexist without hierarchy. In line with European decarbonisation targets, the project offers a concrete and potentially replicable response to the environmental and social challenges of contemporary life: an architecture capable of evolving together with its residents, and a community that can grow around its shared spaces.

Public administration and the housing emergency

The strength of Sa Casa also lies in what it represents: proof that a well-conceived public commission can demand of contemporary architecture its best responses to the housing emergency. That role belongs to public administrations, which hold in their hands the most direct tool for reversing exclusion from housing access, by promoting public land and public housing stock, and entrusting these commissions to teams capable of turning each project into a replicable example.

In the Balearic Islands, the Institut Balear de l’Habitatge (IBAVI) has spent years demonstrating how to do it, with projects such as Son Servera, Mallorca, where Peris+Toral Arquitectes designed Living in Limestone for the IBAVI, forty-two social housing units built with local lime and marés stone, arranged around walkways that function as elevated village streets and foster interaction between neighbours without giving up the privacy of each home, or in Puigpunyent, where Joan J. Fortuny together with Alventosa Morell Arquitectes designed Ses Veles Puigpunyent, six near-zero energy homes built with lime, earth and local ceramics, capable of halving the emissions of conventional construction and cutting its waste by sixty per cent. Both projects show, each at its own scale, that social housing can be dignified, beautiful and deeply rooted in the place that hosts it, and that sustainability, far from making these commissions more expensive or slower, can be precisely what makes them possible.

Sa Casa belongs to that same conviction, brought to the scale of a residential complex of almost two hundred homes. Faced with a problem that strikes with particular severity those who sustain Ibiza’s everyday life, Stefano Boeri Architetti’s project is a reminder that public architecture, when thought through with rigour and time, can offer more than a roof: a way of living in community for people who develop their own capacity to grow and evolve.

Project: Sa Casa.
Architecture: Stefano Boeri Architetti.
Architecture: Ibiza.
Year: 2025 (concurso).
Programme: 190 below-market-rate rental homes, distributed across four volumes.
Construction system: cross-laminated timber (CLT), prefabricated.
Client: Entidad Estatal de Vivienda, Casa 47.
Stefano Boeri Architetti team: Stefano Boeri (socio responsable), Hana Narváez (directora), Silvia Fernández (jefa de proyecto), Nahed Zmeter, Yulia Filatova, Mohamed Hassan Elgendy (equipo de diseño).
Local architect and sustainability strategy: SOCOTEC Spain.
Source: Stefano Boeri Architetti.

Stefano Boeri Architetti

Based in Milan, Shanghai and Tirana, Stefano Boeri Architetti has been researching and designing architecture and urban planning since 1993, when it was founded as Boeri Studio by Stefano Boeri, Gianandrea Barreca and Giovanni La Varra. Multiplicity has been, for more than three decades, the principle guiding an activity that spans architecture, design and urban planning, always attentive to the geopolitical and environmental implications of urban phenomena, and that has turned the studio into an international reference for sustainable architecture and strategic urban development.

The Bosco Verticale, built in Milan in 2014, marked the origin of that outlook: the first prototype of architecture integrating living nature at a large scale, recognised as best building in the world by the CTBUH in Chicago and as best skyscraper by the DAM in Frankfurt. Since then, the studio has carried that language — known as Green Obsession, also the title of its 2021 book — into urban and vertical reforestation projects across different continents, responding in each case to local climate and functional needs. Among them, the Trudo Vertical Forest in Eindhoven, inaugurated in 2021 as the first vertical forest built for social housing, anticipates much of what Sa Casa now proposes in Ibiza: the possibility of combining the environmental challenge with the housing urgency of contemporary cities.

Alongside founding partner Stefano Boeri, the studio is today led by Francesca Cesa Bianchi, Marco Giorgio and Pietro Chiodi, with Hana Narváez, Livia Shamir and Corrado Longa heading the project, research and urban planning departments. Under its name, the studio is currently working on masterplans and architectural projects in cities such as Lausanne, Paris, Utrecht and Milan, without setting aside its commitment to archaeological and cultural heritage, visible in interventions such as the new entrance to the Domus Aurea in Rome or the enhancement of the Paestum archaeological site.

Stefano Boeri

Born in Milan in 1956, Stefano Boeri trained as an architect at the Politecnico di Milano, graduating in 1980, and completed his PhD in Urban Planning at the IUAV University of Venice in 1989. Full Professor of Urban Planning at the Politecnico di Milano and director of the Future City Lab at Tongji University in Shanghai, he has been a visiting professor at institutions including Harvard, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio.

Author of the Bosco Verticale, Boeri is one of the most recognised voices in the international debate on architecture and climate change. He has chaired the scientific committee of Forestami since 2020, the urban forestry project for the Milan metropolitan area that envisions the planting of three million trees by 2030, and served as President of Triennale Milano between 2018 and 2026. His career also includes institutional work, as Councillor for Culture, Fashion and Design for the Municipality of Milan between 2011 and 2013 — years in which he launched festivals such as BookCity and Piano City — and his participation, alongside Richard Burdett, Jacques Herzog and William McDonough, on the committee that defined the concept masterplan for Expo Milano 2015.

In 1993 he founded Multiplicity, a research collective bringing together architects, geographers, artists and photographers around the relationship between geopolitics and urban planning, and between 2004 and 2010 he served as editor-in-chief of Domus and Abitare. His written work, published in books such as L’anticittà, Biomilano and Urbania, and his professional practice, present in cities such as São Paulo, Cairo, Riyadh and Tirana, trace the path of an architect for whom thinking about the contemporary city and designing buildings are, at heart, one and the same exercise.

In one of the residential developments on this peninsula, the Portuguese studio Fragmentos designs this holiday home, Tróia 37, following the style it has developed over the years, one that closely ties architecture to place.

A strategy to gain the horizon

On a plot of around 2,500 m², the Portuguese studio chose a solution the architects define as “calm and earthy”, steering clear of both immaculate white and the colours that stand out among the neighbouring dunes. The house settles into the topography through a sequence of set-back, overlapping volumes, which the studio describes as “a rotation of the house on the site to make the most of the view and the sun”. That rotation also governs the relationship with the neighbours. A series of visual screens divert the eye from the surrounding houses to concentrate attention on the Atlantic Ocean and the Arrábida mountains visible on the horizon.

The material palette reinforces that sense of belonging to the place with earthy tones, timber and metal elements that echo the surroundings, following a logic of “few elements, few colours and few materials” that strengthens its identity, as the architects of Fragmentos explain. The pinkish, sandy render of the walls, the timber porches and the volume crowning the roof, clad in treated pine slats like a discreet beacon over the whole, are variations on one and the same restrained repertoire.

Two ways of inhabiting the house

The house is organised over two floors, which separate the social and private areas. Upstairs, the main suites take advantage of the higher level to reach the views and are connected by a bridge that crosses the void above the living room, making the most of a double-height space that brings into the interior, as the studio describes it, “all the dynamics of filtered light”. A fireplace running through both floors acts as the axis of this “vertical breathing”, keeping the family life of the ground floor connected to the bedrooms.

That double height, more than a formal gesture, is the hinge that joins the two ways of inhabiting the house, the shared life of the social area and the seclusion of the suites, united by the same light that falls from above and by the warmth of a single fireplace.

Refuge in the sand

On the ground floor, the programme is completed by three further bedrooms, which open onto private or semi-private courtyards, reinforcing the house’s sense of refuge. The transition to the outdoors happens through porches and pergolas that extend the limits of the interior spaces, while the pool and the sitting areas blend naturally into the dune.

The garden, designed to require minimal upkeep, draws on native vegetation and tones of dry green and sand, and the pathways, made of timber sleepers laid directly on the sand, underline the idea of a privileged refuge within a sensitive ecosystem. The few trees present on the sandy plots, the odd solitary olive tree, low scrub, do less to decorate than to define, marking the boundary between public and private without the need for a wall.

This house, which lets itself be crossed by the light, the wind and the sand that surround it, is one more piece in the journey Fragmentos has been building along the Portuguese coast, from Comporta to Melides, from Cascais to Tróia, always from the same conviction, that the landscape, and not the architect, has the last word.

Project: Tróia 37.
Location: Tróia, Carvalhal. Portugal.
Area: 342,30 m².
Completed: 2025.
Architecture: Fragmentos.
Specialties: Fragmentos Engenharia, 360 Engenharia.
Landscape design: Greengest, arq. Ana Videira.
Supervision: FFC Gestão de projetos imobiliários.
Construction: ECM Engenharia e Construção.
Measurements: Hugo Pombo.
Photography: Adalberto Duarte.

Fragmentos

Fragmentos was born in Lisbon in 1994 as the shared project of four architects —Duarte Pinto-Coelho, Marcus Cerdeira, Miguel Martins Santos and Pedro Silva Lopes—, determined to understand architecture as a way of reading the relationship between built space and the life that inhabits it. It has since grown into a studio of more than sixty collaborators —architects, engineers, interior designers and communication specialists— today led by eight partners, who join the founders with Fernando Flora, Maria do Rosário Jacinto, João Paulo Branco and David Ferreira.

Fragmentos’ work spans single-family houses, multi-family residential buildings and urban planning, always through cross-disciplinary teams that bring together architecture, engineering and interior design. This way of working —collaborative, attentive to the strength of its relationships with both private clients and public institutions— sustains an idea of sustainability understood as a balance between the people who will inhabit each project and the pace of a technical progress the studio embraces without being carried away by it.

This vocation is recognised with particular clarity in its residential architecture along the Portuguese coast —Comporta, Melides, Tróia, Cascais—, where the project submits to the landscape rather than to the architect’s will: topography, vegetation and light shape volumes, materials and circulation until the boundary between house and surroundings dissolves. It is, in the studio’s own words, an architecture conceived to “provide a sense of belonging and wellbeing” to those who inhabit it.

Fragmentos’ work has been featured in outlets such as Archdaily, Design Boom, Divisare and Architizer. In 2020 it received Portugal’s National Award for Urban Rehabilitation (Prémio Nacional de Reabilitação Urbana) for the restoration of the Palácio da Anunciada.

Galilea is the Mallorcan refuge chosen by the artist Paco Romero to work clay the way it was done before the wheel and the mould: with his hands, with stones and pieces of wood gathered on site, letting the material decide much of the piece — one that does not seek to imitate ancient forms or reproduce a decorative style, with a way of working in which the material takes centre stage.

The evolution of his creative process

Romero was born in Alicante and trained at the higher school of art and design, focusing at first on painting and sculpture on canvas. The decisive turn came in Barcelona, where he spent a season in the studio of the Catalan master ceramicist Ramon Fort, from whom he learned the craft that still drives his passion. “That was when I understood the language of clay, and the infinite possibilities it offered both in ceramics and in painting.”

In 2016 he moved to Mallorca and set up his own studio. He began by making functional pieces that he sold in shops and markets across the island. Over the years, that work evolved into sculptural and decorative objects designed for interior spaces, many of them born from commissions and later turned into permanent installations. It was also during this period that he changed his technique, giving up the wheel to focus on hand-building, a process he calls “more organic and moving.”

The wheel imposes its own geometry; when a piece is shaped by hand, that symmetry disappears, and with it any hurry. The piece grows by accumulation, in a process that can stretch over days. The tools he uses — stones, pebbles or pieces of wood gathered around Galilea — are what give each piece its shape. Each one leaves a distinct mark; the surroundings end up, quite literally, inside the piece.

Time as material

He fires every piece in stoneware at 1280 degrees, which produces work that is highly resistant and properly vitrified despite its raw, weathered appearance. The glazes, formulated in-house, can develop a craquelure over time that Romero regards as part of the piece’s natural ageing. The erosion of the pieces, left unpolished, is part of the story each one tells.

Romero controls just enough to know what he is doing, without “switching off” the piece before its time. “When you control the whole process, leaving no room for intuition or improvisation, there is no room for emotion,” he explains. “In my work I always try to leave part of the process to chance; that part of the process is what gives the piece its soul.”

That relationship with time runs through all of his work. “My references are the effects generated by the passing of time,” and his work is grounded in “the memory accumulated by the objects, places and people” that inspire him. Even the craft itself follows that same cumulative logic: “Over the years you also learn that hands have memory — they are a tool that accumulates years of learning, of mistakes and successes.”

That idea gives rise to his different series, each built on the same hand-modelled clay, but asking the material a different question.

Estratos series

Estratos points to the earth, to primitive cultures and to the mark time leaves on objects. Each piece is built from overlapping layers of different clays, which reveal veins and sediments until the surface becomes a kind of geological cross-section.

Pieles series

Pieles seeks clay in its purest state, with no layers standing in to interpret it “a study of the possibilities of clay in its purest state, without surface layers.”

Invierno series

Invierno is an ode to liquid porcelain seen through a wabi-sabi sensibility, “seeking the beauty of asymmetry and imperfection in the simplicity of ancient primitive ceramics.”

Tótem series

Tótem, the series that engages most closely with architecture, proposes ring-shaped forms that repeat themselves until they find the one the place calls for: “the shape and size of the piece is not fixed from the start, and changes as it is built, according to what it conveys to me. It is also the most flexible in scale — the same form works as a floor piece or as an object for a shelf, depending on the space it has to occupy.”

Painting with clay

His investigation continues into painting. At times, Romero looks toward primitive architecture and the urban layout of ancient Mediterranean settlements, building surfaces where clay, local earths and acrylic engage in different layers. In other works the reference becomes more essential: primitive symbols, forms and marks emerge from sediments that build up on the canvas until they form compositions of mineral sobriety. In both cases he also revives ancient processes such as terra sigillata, a Roman clay-decanting technique that he adapts to contemporary sculpture and painting. “It is both a privilege and a responsibility to be able to recover and keep alive techniques that have been in use for centuries, to honour their history and to do so respectfully toward the people who, centuries ago, developed these techniques with the scarce resources available to them,” he explains. “In a way it is my tribute to those people, a return to the origins, to the first inhabitants.”

Romero’s work has steadily found its place in architecture and interior design projects: collaborations with studios such as Durietz Design, Melt Spaces and Contain Studio, totemic pieces on display at the Hotel Nobis in Palma, permanent installations at Terraza Balear and Tea Ritual, the Lab Oliver Prize in 2023, and his recent inclusion in Kave Home Gallery, which has added his sculptural ceramics to its selection of artists. All of it without altering the scale or the pace of a studio that remains small, and deliberately limited in output.

What Romero ultimately seeks is for his pieces to feel as though they had always been there. “With my work I try to create a sense of timelessness, a point of peace, of balance,” he says. “I would like anyone who looks at, or lives with, the piece to feel that it was always there, that it has witnessed the passing of time and has a story to tell.”

All photos @ Paco Romero.

Two centuries-old houses reunited

Among these houses in Vulpellac there is one that brings together, under a single roof, two different eras: a fourteenth-century construction and a seventeenth-century extension, merged into a single two-storey home listed as national heritage. When the interior designer Clara Lleal received the commission for its restoration, the house had lost much of its character under layers of unrelated interventions, strident colour combinations, mismatched materials, a coherence diluted by the years. The purpose of the project, is summed up in the name the studio gave it: Recovering the calm.

Stone, lime and memory

The intervention began with what could not be seen. The walls of the ground floor carried rising damp aggravated by cement renders that prevented their natural transpiration; removing them and replacing them with lime stuccoes restored to the building one of its oldest functions, that of breathing. In that same process a window appeared, bricked up since the time when part of the house functioned as the village grocery store, its recovery not only restores the original reading of the façade, it also lets light return in depth to spaces that had gone decades without it.

On that basis, the interior designer unified the house with a continuous stone-toned microcement floor, extended across both storeys, staircase and bathrooms, as a gesture that erases the seams between the old and the added. The new staircase was designed as a sequence of monochromatic planes that integrates into the whole; a single Il Fanale lamp, placed at floor level, is enough to give it a sculptural presence.

A house to inhabit slowly

The ground floor brings together the daytime spaces around a patio with a porch, while the upper floor houses an open study and three bedrooms. From the entrance, a wide hallway organises the circulation towards the different spaces.

In the living room, the low height of the vaulted ceiling led to ruling out any technical lighting in favour of an indirect, intimate light; an antique chair, restored while respecting the original tone of its wood, converses with a Vibia lamp in a contrast between the old and the contemporary that repeats throughout the house. The kitchen gained surface area by removing a partition wall that hid two panels of exposed stone, and is organised around an antique cast-iron cooking range; the table, chairs and lamps are pieces sourced in France. Outside, the patio recovered the original tone of the exposed brick of its vault after removing years of climbing plants that were overloading the walls.

Quiet, timeless spaces on the upper floor

Upstairs, the study brings together an antique table and chair with a work by Carla Tarruella that integrates into the general atmosphere of the space. The three bedrooms continue the same discourse of neutrality and sobriety. In the main suite, a large pencil drawing by Marcos Isamat lends depth through the subtlety of its lines; the second bedroom is furnished with vintage pieces from Casa Azul Bisbal and DCW Éditions lamps; the third preserves a medieval window, for which a light timber frame was designed that leaves historic architecture as the sole protagonist. The bathrooms follow the same formal refinement, with built-in white furniture, marble countertop washbasins and classically inspired mirrors.

The decisive role of August, the owner

The involvement of August, owner of the house and co-author in practice of a project that is also his own, has been decisive. His was the unhurried search through antique dealers and vintage shops in Catalonia and France —among them Casa Azul Bisbal and Espacio Noguera— to find each piece of furniture, and his the judgement with which, after touring galleries, he chose the works of art for the different spaces. The result is an essential house, with a palette reduced to whites, off-whites and natural wood, in which every object has a reason to be there and in which the absence of artifice becomes the true luxury.

More than a renovation, the project is a reconciliation with the history of the place, one that silences the noise accumulated over decades so that a centuries-old architecture can breathe again as it deserves. Between centuries-old walls of stone, lime and natural light, this house in Vulpellac recovers the calm it treasured for so many years, the same calm that can be breathed in the streets of the whole town.

Project: Recuperar la calma.
Location: Vulpellac, Baix Empordà.
Autoría: Clara Lleal Interiorista y August Mabilon.
Photography: Maria Pujol.
Furniture: Casa Azul Bisbal y Espacio Noguera, tiendas vintage.
Rugs: Zara Home.
Lighting: Nemo, Vibia, Il Fanale, Lyte, DCW Éditions, Louis Poulsen, Santa & Cole, Karman.
Art: Carla Tarruella, Marcos Isamat.
Fittings: Fontini, Font Barcelona.
Source: Clara Lleal.

Clara Lleal

Clara Lleal trained as an interior designer at the Escola Massana in Barcelona, and has since worked with the conviction that interior spaces shape the way we live, which is why they deserve the same care as any other important decision in life.

Her career begins in the late nineties designing shop windows for the major bookstores of the RBA/Edipresse group, and takes definitive shape in the year 2000, when she co-founds the Cm2 Disseny studio in Barcelona, where for two decades she develops residential and contract projects. Between 2003 and 2015 she also takes on the Spanish distribution of the Italian furniture firm FIAPP International. That journey, made up of very different projects, ends up settling into a criterion of her own, a natural and warm interior design, of simple lines and durable materials, in which Nordic influence coexists with the Mediterranean roots of Catalonia, where she lives and works.

In 2019 that criterion finds a home of its own. Lleal founds her studio in Badalona, Clara Lleal Interiorista, of which she is creative director, and from which she carries out residential and commercial interior architecture projects. “Living better through design” sums up, in her own words, what she pursues in every project. We spend most of our lives in interior spaces, so these should inspire us and make us feel good.

A painter and ceramicist in her free time, Lleal brings that craft sensibility to her projects, where handmade, one-of-a-kind pieces are never lacking. That same eye, attentive to craftsmanship and to what is made by hand, has taken her work beyond the studio, her projects have been published in trend blogs, magazines and books in more than forty countries, and she has served on international interior design juries.

The most visible recognition of this stage came with Casa Galería de Arte, distinguished in 2023 with the Best of the Best award at the Architecture MasterPrize (Los Angeles) and a Special Mention at the German Design Award (Frankfurt), after already having received in 2022 the Overall Winner award at the SBID International Design Awards (London), having been a finalist at the IDA International Design Awards, and having been named Project of the Year by the Italian portal Archilovers.