It is no coincidence that some of the most influential collections of recent years — from Ikea’s collaborations with Nordic designers to the output of brands such as Hay or Menu — have returned to that formal vocabulary. The interest is, above all, functional: California Modernism found good answers to the problems of the small home and the social life, and those answers remain relevant.

In this renovation of a 95 m² flat on Madrid’s Paseo de Extremadura, Marta Miñarro chooses that reference as a starting point — and it proves entirely apt.

The flat had a compartmentalised layout, a long entrance hall acting as a barrier, and a closed kitchen that turned its back on the living room. The owners wanted more light, better connection between rooms, and a home that could receive guests well. Lemon Studio’s project responds to each of those needs with precise, considered solutions.

The first move is the entrance hall. Rather than keeping it as a corridor, it opens towards the study through a ribbed glass partition with an orange frame that allows light to pass through uninterrupted. The frame colour — a warm terracotta that reappears in door surrounds, handles and wall lights — is a decision about continuity: the thread that runs through the house from end to end.

The kitchen integrated into the living room, the heart of the home

The kitchen is integrated into the living room by removing the wall between them, shortening the hallway in the process. The result is a generous central space, with sage-green floor-to-ceiling units, and a sixties-style terrazzo floor that marks the change of zone naturally. At its centre, a mobile island on wheels combines a white-lacquered structure with an oak front. It is not fixed because it does not need to be. It can move towards the kitchen when cooking in company, or draw back towards the living area when the occasion calls for it. It is a piece designed to accompany the act of receiving guests, which is exactly what the owners asked for.

The living room organises itself around a low bouclé sofa in grey, a round dark-wood coffee table, and a Klein blue pouf that introduces the first strong chromatic accent. In front of the window, lined natural linen curtains by Gredecor, and two works on the walls by Alejandra Duarte and Marata Besada. The selection is not incidental: both in scale and palette, the works are in dialogue with the tones of the house.

The simplicity of the main suite

The main suite follows a simple logic. The bedroom faces the exterior, and the bathroom and dressing room shift towards the inner courtyard, where the light is more diffuse and stable. The suite bathroom works with white penny mosaic tiles, a bespoke unit in cornflower blue with red knobs — a contrast that refers directly to the pop palette of the sixties — and a blue chequerboard hydraulic tile floor. The sliding door with an orange frame connects visually with the bedroom without interrupting the flow of the space.

The second bathroom, more compact, opts for square white mosaic tiles on the walls, a fluted column washbasin, and a black-and-orange floral hydraulic tile floor that makes the pavement the protagonist.

The study displays a new integrated palette

The study, reached from the entrance hall through the glass door, holds a different palette: fired-clay terracotta floor, olive-green joinery, and a wooden work surface beneath the window, with a slatted blind and leather tape. The Bertoia chair, left unupholstered, recalls that this space belongs to the same family of references as the rest of the house. A style carried through the whole project as attitude, beyond decoration.

The result is a home where every design decision strikes a balance between aesthetics and use. Light, materials and the new layout produce warm, comfortable and deeply liveable spaces.

Project: SL-PE31.
Location: Paseo de Extremadura 31. Madrid.
Area: 95 m².
Completed: 2026.
Interior design: Studio Lemon.
Photography: Amador Toril.
Styling: Cristina Rodríguez Goitia.
Art: Alejandra Duarte and Marata Besada.
Curtains and textiles: Gredecor. Table lamp: Soulem. Pouf: Lizzo. Chequerboard cushion: Pepe Peñalver. Round rug: Lorena Casals.
Source: Studio Lemon

Marta Miñarro. Studio Lemon

Marta Miñarro Martínez holds a degree in Architecture from the Universidad Alfonso X el Sabio in Madrid, where she received first prize in the faculty’s residential design and urban planning competition.

Before founding her own studio, she broadened her experience in Helsinki at Ateljé Sotamaa, a firm specialising in single-family housing and restoration. The Nordic influence of that period — constructive rigour, material honesty, and a clean approach to domestic space — is evident in her subsequent work.

In 2021 she founded Lemon Studio, with offices in Madrid and Lorca (Murcia). Since its founding, the studio has specialised in distinctive residential and restoration projects, with a portfolio spanning Madrid, Murcia and the Mediterranean coast.

The studio’s philosophy is rooted in the conviction that architecture is deeply bound to people — to the way they inhabit and experience space. This premise translates into a working method that combines technical knowledge and aesthetic intuition, drawing strong inspiration from art, design and traditional craft. Meticulous attention to detail, a careful selection of materials, and a particular sensitivity to colour and texture are the hallmarks of every project. The result: interiors that are singular, timeless and honest.

The twentieth century interrupted that situation rapidly. The mechanisation of farming, rural depopulation and the urban pressure of the Barcelona coastline transformed the territory within a few decades. Many masies lost their productive function and with it the continuous maintenance that had kept them going. What remained, across much of El Maresme, are the walls: the structure still standing, the façade holding on and the roof caved in. Stone skeletons waiting for a decision.

The centuries-old masia restored here, situated on rural land within the natural park of El Maresme, arrived at the start of the project in a state of ruin. Only the structural walls and part of the collapsed roof remained standing. The ensemble nevertheless retained the memory of a wine-producing activity that had given the building its character for generations. The cups — large stone tanks where the wine fermented — were still there, in what had been the production area.

The intervention as a reading of the building

Oliver Segura approached the rehabilitation with prior rigour. Before proposing any solution, an archaeological study analysed the subsoil in depth. Once the absence of significant remains had been confirmed, it was possible to incorporate a ventilated crawl space slab that today improves the hygrothermal performance of the ensemble and discreetly houses the installations. The architecture bore fruit after a period of thorough study.

The project preserves the original structural morphology and its constructive logic. The main façade is kept intact; the interventions on the secondary façades were restrained and consistent with the natural evolution of the building. The variations introduced read as new layers on a structure that already had character, extending its history with precision, without altering the reading of the ensemble.

At the centre of the masia, a covered courtyard with a mechanical opening is incorporated, functioning as a bioclimatic lung. It regulates natural ventilation, optimises the entry of light and establishes visual relationships between rooms. It is a new element, but one that responds to an ancient logic — that of the courtyard as the domestic heart of Mediterranean architecture.

The wine-producing memory

The former wine production area is transformed into the main daytime space, at double height. The cups, recovered and dignified as spatial elements, occupy the centre of the room. Their scale, materiality and position in the space speak of the production they housed for generations, forming part of the programme and recognisable as the central argument of this floor.

The old kitchen retains its original character and is integrated as the protagonist piece of the communal area. Its proportions and materials tell a story that the new architecture has known how to listen to. The stables are reorganised to accommodate the hotel’s five double rooms, maintaining their historical proportions. The arch of the rear courtyard is restored to articulate the transition between the interior and the landscape, a threshold that has marked the passage between inhabited space and open countryside for centuries, and that fulfils the same function today with the same naturalness.

Materials and technique

The material palette follows a logic of compatibility with the existing fabric. Lime mortars, wood, stone and ceramics are the base materials of the intervention. The joinery, both exterior and interior, is executed in Corten steel with a thermal break. This material introduces a contemporary language with honesty: its oxidised and patinated texture dialogues with the aged stone, visible as a new element and legible as part of the same system.

In the transition zones, the small-format travertine flooring provides warmth and tactile continuity. It functions as a sensory guide along the route, accompanying the visitor through the passage between rehabilitated and reconfigured spaces. The climate system, via radiant floor heating, is completely integrated, with the technology remaining invisible.

A hotel that is inhabited as a masia

The masia functions today as a small rural hotel with five double rooms and a communal area comprising a sitting room, dining room and kitchen. A programme of domestic hospitality, offering the experience of inhabiting the masia through its routes, the variation of light throughout the day, the texture of the materials, the spatial sequences that reveal the history of the place. When moving through the rooms, passing under the arch of the courtyard or having breakfast in the old kitchen, the history of the masia can be felt, coming back to life.

Oliver Segura’s project in El Maresme belongs to that tradition of interventions that understand heritage as living matter. The masia has come back to life because the architect knew how to read it attentively, and developed an architecture with the precision that allows its history to continue.

Original condition

Project: Integral rehabilitation of a Catalan masia for hotel use.
Location: El Maresme, Barcelona.
Floor area: 710 m².
Completed: 2025.
Architecture: Oliver Segura Arquitectura.
Photography: Mario Martínez.

Oliver Segura

Oliver Segura Arquitectura is a Barcelona-based studio specialising in the rehabilitation, restoration and conservation of architectural heritage. Since its founding in 2016, the studio has developed a practice steadily oriented towards intervention on existing buildings: masies, village houses, Modernista estates, historic palaces and other architecturally valuable constructions that constitute the bulk of its activity.

Oliver Segura trained at the Escola d’Arquitectura La Salle of the Universitat Ramon Llull, where he completed his degree in Architecture between 2010 and 2016, including an international exchange year at the Facultade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo Escola da Cidade in São Paulo. Before graduating, he studied for the Master in Restoration of Architectural Monuments at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, a postgraduate programme specialising in the study and design of the restoration of monuments, ensembles and historic landscapes. He extended his training with the Postgraduate in Integral Rehabilitation of Buildings at the Escola Sert of the Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya (2017–2018) and with a specialist course in timber construction at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (2020–2021). This accumulated formation — architectural, heritage-focused and technical — defines a profile that extends into continuous specialisation.

For Segura, rehabilitation means not only conservation but also interpretation. Each existing building poses a conversation between past and present. What must be preserved, what can be transformed and how to incorporate new ways of inhabiting without blurring the identity of the place. In that balance — tense and necessary — between conservation and contemporaneity lies the core of his work, which approaches each intervention with respect for the original constructive systems, the material memory of the building and its relationship with the landscape.

This way of designing translates into solutions that the studio itself defines as serene, precise and honest. Spatial, constructive and energy responses consistent with the building and its surroundings, capable of bringing out the value of what exists without relinquishing the current requirements of comfort, functionality and sustainability. An architecture that gives continuity to the building’s own history.

Alongside technical rigour, the studio’s working process is distinguished by a relational dimension that Segura understands as a constitutive part of the commission. Accompanying the client through all phases of the project, from the first conversations to the construction work, is grounded in closeness, trust and continuous dialogue. In this conception, architecture is a shared process in which every decision arises from technical rigour, sensitivity and attention to detail.

Villa Talha was built in this setting through a collaboration between Alfonso Architects and Contacto Atlântico, the studio led by André Caiado in Estoril. The sum of both perspectives produces a work that combines formal clarity with attentiveness to this privileged place. An architecture that reads the Alentejo with precision and its own materials.

Alentejo Architecture

The volumetric composition unfolds across two levels with a built area of 495 m². The volumes, clean in profile with traditional tiled pitched roofs, fragment to follow the topography and existing vegetation. The whiteness of the painted render, a reflection of the enduring presence of Alentejo architecture, acts here as both ground and figure. It gathers the southern light, casts sharp midday shadows and gives the ensemble a visual density that needs no ornament.

The entry sequence begins outside, with a gentle ramp in traditional Portuguese cobblestone that marks the transition between public and private space. The choice of material is not accidental, paving stone has a centuries-long presence in Portugal; here, at the threshold of a contemporary villa, it acts as a cultural marker, a gesture towards a territory with history.

A generous entrance hall

Inside, a generous entrance hall opens towards the garden and pool through large black steel frames, a space defined by the sweeping helical staircase that organises the domestic experience. With timber treads and a curved plaster balustrade, it rises beneath a skylight and traces a vertical route filled with light.

The ground-floor rooms are ordered around the tension between interior and exterior. The living room extends beneath a timber pergola, robust in structure and generous in section, that covers the terrace and organises the transition to the water. The pool, contained in edge and rectangular in geometry, sits on a dark timber deck that ties it to the house and separates it from the garden of sand and gravel where olive trees and lavender grow. The orientation of the whole keeps views open to the landscape.

A warm, restrained interior palette

The interiors work with a warm, restrained palette of Moleanos stone on the floors, oak timber in the bedroom paving and bathroom joinery, handmade irregular-format tiles in the showers. The material chosen for each room carries enough texture to register the passage of light and time, and to convey that the house was built to be lived in.

The relationship between Villa Talha and its setting is that of an architecture that learned to listen before it came to be. The project combines the constructive intelligence of Contacto Atlântico with the conceptual work of Alberto Alfonso Architects to produce, in this preserved corner of the Atlantic, a house that belongs to a place made for the quiet of the Alentejo.

Project: Villa Talha.
Location: Melides, Portugal.
Completed: 2025.
Conceptual architect: Alberto Alfonso Architects.
Local architect: Contacto Atlântico.
Plot area: 2.049 m².
Built area: 495,68 m².
Floor plan: 305,52 m². 2 levels.
Photography: Gonçalo Henriques.
Source: Contacto Atlântico.

André Caiado. Contacto Atlântico

André Caiado was born in Lisbon in 1967 and trained as an architect at the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, graduating in 1990. From Lisbon he moved to Madrid, to the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, where he completed a master’s degree in Computing for Architecture, Urban Planning and Real Estate Management and, in 1995, defended his doctoral thesis on Intelligent Building Technologies with the highest distinction — cum laude. During those years he worked in parallel as an architect at IBM and Telefónica, a dual experience that shaped from the outset his understanding of the discipline: as a practice that integrates technical knowledge, constructive intelligence and the strategic dimension of the project.

Back in Lisbon, he led the Environment and Architecture departments at Novodesign and taught at various universities for more than two decades. In 1996 he founded Contacto Atlântico in Estoril. What began as an architecture studio has grown, over thirty years, into a multidisciplinary firm with dozens of specialists covering every field linked to the construction project: architecture, engineering, urban planning, interior design, landscape architecture and architectural visualisation.

Contacto Atlântico has built a diverse body of work, with projects for national and international clients. Among its most recognised references are the Diário de Notícias building — awarded on several occasions — and the intervention in the Quarteirão do Rossio, within Lisbon’s built heritage.

Beyond professional practice, André Caiado takes an active part in disciplinary debate at a global scale: he lectures on architecture across different countries and advises the European Commission as an expert in the evaluation of urban energy efficiency projects under the FP7 and Horizon 2020 programmes. He has also served on the executive board of BUILT CoLAB, the Portuguese platform for R&D and digitalisation in the construction sector.

Three decades of work have established at Contacto Atlântico a studio culture that combines technical rigour, project management capacity and attentiveness to place. An architecture that cannot be understood apart from its context — geographical, climatic, heritage — and that finds in the intelligence of the constructive process its most distinctive form of expression.

The project has a double vocation. On one hand, to create lasting pieces that dignify the everyday: the table, the bed, the inhabited space, restoring to textile the symbolic and aesthetic place it once occupied in our culture. On the other, to foster knowledge through seminars, courses and encounters with the aim of revaluing textile craft.

The Segovian monastery

In the 13th century, the Cistercian Order raised the monastery of Santa María de la Sierra on the Segovian slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama, in Collado Hermoso. Cistercian architecture answered to a severe rule: sobriety, proportion, rejection of the superfluous. Those same values, form arising from material, without ornament to betray it, are present today, eight centuries on, in every piece that leaves the Ábbatte workshop.

The small community that inhabited the monastery came to host kings in the 14th century. Then came the decline, the gradual abandonment, the 19th-century ecclesiastical confiscations that turned the building into a farm. The stones began to fall. In 2005, Elena Goded and her husband acquired the ruins. “I did not seek out the monastery, it was the monastery that found me,” she recounts, “and we made a commitment to give it the greatest possible care.”

What followed was a work of consolidation as artisanal in spirit as the work now carried out within its walls: a local stonemason went fixing stone by stone the structure, securing the perimeter with a metal tie, while lichens, stone degraded by water and vegetation growing between the joints were continuously cleared away. The ruin stabilised without being falsified. Its condition as a fragment, as arrested time, was respected. In dialogue with the monastery, new working spaces were built: volumes of local timber and golden granite that frame it without usurping the character of the place.

Today the monastery of Santa María de la Sierra forms part of Ábbatte’s DNA: a building that encapsulates, with the eloquence of what has survived, the essential values of the firm: mastery, rootedness in the land, permanence. The monastery, ever present, reminds those who work beside its arches of the continuity of human endeavour.

The workshop beside the monastery

The Ábbatte workshop occupies one of the new pavilions built alongside the monastery. It is a luminous, ordered space, where hand looms stand in line like instruments of a craft that admits no shortcuts. The warp, that array of parallel, taut threads that forms the foundation of the weave, is prepared with patience before the weft can begin its interlacing. Once a piece is finished, it is hand-finished with needle and thread, then washed so that the taut fibres relax and the textile reaches its definitive hand.

The weavers who bring these pieces to life are professionals from Segovia, led by Elena Goded Rambaud, founder of the firm, and Camila Lanzas, its creative director, art historian and designer. The team is formed by Cristina Escribano, María del Carmen Gimeno, Carmen Palermo, Marta Rueda, and Ana María Martín Gil, who was part of the team at the San Pablo workshops of the renowned Gerda Kramer, and later trained the new Ábbatte team in its early days.

Beside the weaving workshop, in one of the timber cabins on the estate, the dyeing of yarns takes place. It is here that the work takes on something close to the alchemical. The pigments, sourced exclusively from plants or insects, are applied through a rigorous process comprising three stages: scouring, to cleanse the fibre of impurities; mordanting, to fix the colour; and the dye bath, at controlled temperature. The result is colours not found in any conventional catalogue. Intense yet elusive, always in harmony with one another because they all proceed from the same source: nature. They are, in Goded’s words, colours for visual pleasure.

The dye garden: a recovered heritage

Where Cistercian monks once cultivated their kitchen garden, Ábbatte has created something extraordinary: an ethnobotanical garden of dye plants that is one of the most complete in Europe. Seventy distinct species, dyer’s broom, indigo, tansy, bearberry, sumac, madder, and many others, grow in geometric terraces overlooking the sierra, sheltered by the monastery walls as if in an organic continuation of the same monastic vocation.

Each plant has had to prove that it can survive the Segovian climate and that it contains, in some part of itself, root, leaf, flower, bark, pigments suited to dyeing. Diego de Allas, responsible for the garden and the overall maintenance of the estate, is the guardian of this green heritage.
Madder deserves special mention. Its root produces an intense terracotta red that Mediterranean civilisations —Egypt, Crete, Greece, Rome— and northern cultures used for millennia. Castile was for centuries one of Europe’s principal suppliers of quality madder. A knowledge that was lost, and that Ábbatte, quietly, is working to recover.

The garden, however, does not aim to produce the dyes used in the workshop, for that, many hectares would be needed for each pigment. Its mission is more subtle and ambitious: to make known this specific use of plants, as ancient as civilisation and as forgotten as so many essential things. To transmit value, to make visible what time has rendered invisible.

The Ábbatte collection

The Ábbatte collection embraces the domestic space in its entirety: blankets, quilts and bed runners; cushions; rugs; tablecloths and napkins; curtains, sheers and Japanese roller blinds; upholstered headboards; and wearable pieces, shawls, ponchos, scarves, that carry the same philosophy to the body as to the home. The underlying aim in all of them is always the same: materiality must not be concealed, it must be revealed.

The textiles are woven in classic structures —plain weave, herringbone, houndstooth— in widths of up to 3.10 metres. For larger-scale projects, Ábbatte assembles several lengths according to its own criteria: the joins are integrated into the design, sometimes as almost imperceptible seams in the same tone as the textile, at other times as contrasts that underscore the composition and lend it character. A gesture of constructive honesty not alien to the tradition of the finest crafts.

The colour palette, built entirely from natural dyes and executed to order, produces those indefinable tones that resist being precisely named yet are recognised at once as belonging to nature: earths, ochres, blues that lean towards green, pinks that recall damp clay. Colours that age well, that change with the light, that keep you company.

Textile as interior architecture

Cada vez más estudios de arquitectura e interiorismo encuentran en An increasing number of architecture and interior design studios find in Ábbatte a partner with whom to build the sensorial atmosphere of their projects. The firm works both on comprehensive textile commissions for a home or space and on individual pieces that complete or elevate already-defined interiors.

The Ábbatte portfolio includes projects in Menorca, Asturias, Santander, Madrid, Alicante and Toledo, and collaborations with studios as prestigious as Pierre Yovanovitch and Marta de la Rica, among others. Alpaca blankets over chaise longues, Castilian wool rugs in rooms with timber ceilings, cushion sets for stone porches, linen-merino tablecloths on walnut tables. In each case, the piece becomes part of the memory of the space.

For design professionals, Ábbatte also offers advisory meetings, in person or online, to explore in detail the processes, available materials and commissioning possibilities. The workshop is open to developing ideas for new uses of textile: fabric screens to divide spaces, special upholsteries, wall coverings. The only condition is that the material be noble and the process honest.

In a sector where the ephemeral has become the norm, Ábbatte proposes an alternative that is profoundly contemporary: the conviction that well-made objects transform the people who inhabit them. That living with artisanal textiles transmits calm and restores the capacity to perceive the value of what endures.

Elena Goded Rambaud

Elena Goded is a biologist by training, a doctor in Philosophy and Educational Sciences, a university professor for decades, and now, perhaps as the natural consequence of all that came before, the founder of one of the most singular and acclaimed textile craft projects in Spain.

She graduated in Biological Sciences at a time when the scientific gaze and the artistic gaze were still considered separate territories. Her career brought them closer together. Over more than twenty years she was a tenured professor at UNED, where she directed the Textile Crafts course from 1990 to 2010, training generations of teachers in the knowledge of fabrics, dyes and the crafts of fibre. In parallel, she taught courses at various universities on natural dyes, applied botany and the history of dress: a territory of intersection between science, history and material culture that few had explored with such rigour.

This teaching work led her to publish reference works for the study of textile craft, among them the volumes El taller textil en el aula: Tintes naturales and El taller textil en el aula: La tejeduría, published by UNED, which remain foundational texts in their field. Her rigour as a researcher and her ability to convey the value of the crafts made her an authority in the Spanish landscape of artisanal culture.

That body of knowledge, accumulated over decades, found an unexpected stage from 2005 onwards. That year, Elena and her husband acquired the ruins of the Cistercian monastery of Santa María de la Sierra, in Collado Hermoso, Segovia. It was not a premeditated decision: it was, as she herself recounts, an encounter. “I did not seek out the monastery, it was the monastery that found me.” What followed was a long, demanding commitment to the restoration and consolidation of the remains of the abbey, which were in a state of advanced abandonment.

In that same territory, in 2013, Ábbatte was born —its name derived from the Latin term for abbey— co-founded with her daughter Camila Lanzas, art historian and designer. The firm represented the confluence of everything Elena Goded had cultivated throughout her career: scientific knowledge of fibres and pigments, a historical understanding of textile as cultural object, a pedagogical vocation, and a deep rootedness in a place and a territory. Ábbatte is a synthesis of the road travelled.

Recognition came quickly. In 2015, Ábbatte received the National Crafts Award in the Entrepreneurship category, granted by the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism. In 2017, the project was distinguished with the Hispania Nostra Award for Good Practices in the conservation of cultural and natural heritage, a prize that explicitly recognised the work of recovering the monastery and transforming it into a living productive space.

Elena Goded’s standing in the field of contemporary craft extends well beyond her own enterprise. In 2018 she was one of the founders and president of SACo, the Society of Contemporary Craftspeople, an association that brings together Spanish designers and craft firms under criteria of excellence and contemporaneity, with the aim of establishing quality craftsmanship as a cultural and economic reference of the first order. SACo has since developed projects of national and international visibility, including collaborations with Mazda at the Madrid Design Festival. The Juan March Foundation, at its Palma headquarters, has also hosted lectures by Elena Goded on artisanal textiles and their philosophy, integrating her work into the circuit of contemporary Spanish culture.

Today Elena Goded leads Ábbatte from the Segovian monastery, alongside Camila Lanzas and a team of local weavers and craftspeople. Her figure embodies something that has become rare: coherence between thought and practice, research and object, tradition and contemporary proposal. At a moment when craft is once again being reclaimed as a cultural and environmental response to the excesses of industrial production, Elena Goded has spent decades building, with patience and rigour, precisely that.

The project was commissioned by a couple with two children who wanted to live with the outdoors as an active part of daily life, and to return to Matadepera — a village to which they had been connected since childhood.

Twobo — the studio founded by María Pancorbo, Alberto Twose and Pablo Twose — began the project from a careful attentiveness to the site. The plot has a pronounced topography, with zones of damp shade under oaks and holm oaks, and openings onto the landscape and the western sun. The earth is red, like the rock that dominates the horizon. That chromatic and geological condition is the material of the project, one to which the architects chose to give full prominence.

Two volumes among the holm oaks

The formal response is unequivocal: fragment in order to merge. The house divides into two volumes that follow the contour lines and embrace between them a small oak woodland. One houses communal life — open spaces oriented towards the views and the afternoon sun; the other gathers the privacy of the bedrooms, organised around a courtyard. The separation between the two bodies is a decision of implantation: by fragmenting, the house loses scale, adjusts to the profile of the hillside, and allows the woodland to penetrate the heart of domestic life. The architects invoke Alvar Aalto’s experimental house at Muuratsalo, where he tested autonomous volumes on rocky topography: “fragmentation can be a way of disappearing, and of uniting architecture and nature.”

The walls emerge from the ground itself, following the contour lines. The drawing process made this evident: “as we traced them, it seemed as though we were unearthing them directly from the earth, like ruins that had always been there,” the architects note. Above them rise the concrete vaults that shelter the interior space. The section is as direct as it is expressive: a wall that rises, a vault that covers, a floor that extends the ground outside. The house is partially buried, gains thermal mass, and reduces its presence on the landscape.

Concrete pigmented in reddish tones

The central material is concrete pigmented in reddish tones — both structural system and final finish. The formwork imprint remains visible on the surfaces. Alongside the concrete, lime render and ceramic tiles complete a palette that speaks to the tones of the terrain. The Catalan vault defines the main spaces — living room, dining room, kitchen — and builds an interior continuity almost without interruption. The earthy red of the interior holds in tension the intense green of the exterior, which enters through the windows with a force that chromatic contrast turns into physical presence.

The relationship with the place becomes literal in the courtyard, where the architects chose to preserve a rock that remains fixed to the geometry of the house. It is a small gesture, but one that reveals the attitude of the project: the terrain, with its irregularities and accidents, is the true interlocutor. The exterior vegetation extends the continuity of a house built to merge with its place.

A place to live differently

Casa Sota la Mola belongs to a line of work that Twobo has been developing for years: an architecture that finds its form from the place, rather than from a prior image. In Matadepera that position is almost literal. The mountain was there. The earth was red. The oak woodland occupied the centre of the plot. The architecture found a way to inhabit it without disturbing it, and in that act of attentiveness there is something that goes beyond technique: an ethics of presence that, in the best sense, makes this house a place to live differently.

Project: Casa Sota la Mola.
Type: vivienda unifamiliar.
Location: Matadepera, Barcelona
Area: 250 m².
Completed: 2025
Architecture: Twobo.
Photography: José Hevia.
Collaborators: Claudia Canalda, Sara Alves, Javi Comadrán, Víctor Díaz-Asensio, Ourania Chamilaki.
Contractor: Prismatic 360 + Coterm (instalaciones).
Furniture: Bivaq.
Source: Twobo.

Twobo Arquitectura

Twobo Arquitectura is an architecture studio based in Barcelona, founded by architects Pablo Twose, María Pancorbo and Alberto Twose. Since its beginnings more than fifteen years ago, the studio has focused its practice on housing projects and architectures of a domestic scale, understood as spaces where the essential decisions of contemporary living are concentrated.

Twobo’s work is defined by a rigorous approach to physical and climatic context, in which orientation, topography and environmental conditions become active components of the project from its earliest stages. Architecture is constructed through clear geometries and precise spatial systems, where each element responds to a recognisable functional and constructive logic. There are no superfluous gestures: form is always the result of a creative process, developed in an artisanal manner, seeking an apparent simplicity that adapts to each client. See full biography.

Castelló works from Formentera with an intellectual coherence and a fidelity to the territory that place him in the lineage of the tradition Álvaro Siza consolidated in Portugal: the one that understands architecture as listening rather than imposition, that turns the act of building into a gesture of continuity with the memory of place. His works — and Ses Clotades is their most mature expression to date — possess that quality of things that were always there, even if they have just been built.

A landscape shaped by hollows

Ses Clotades names an area of the isthmus connecting La Mola with the rest of Formentera’s territory, a geographical threshold of singular character. Castelló describes it with a precision worth quoting: it is “a shifting topography, a play of ascents and descents, the result of the slow consolidation of a vast dune system today largely colonised by an extensive woodland mass.” In that threshold between pine forest and cultivated fields — a landscape shaped by hollows that sink between small sand hills — the house emerges by adopting the language of its surroundings.

The implantation responds with “a dialogue of contraries: addition and subtraction, ascent and descent, solidity and permeability, light and shadow.” Three volumes rest on a concrete podium: two bodies of different heights housing the living spaces, and a third that burrows into the earth to become water. The swimming pool thus forms part of the tectonic logic of the whole — buried and reflective, like a mirror of the inverted landscape.

Volumetry and programme

The taller volume conceals itself among the nearest pines, lightened by a constellation of patios that erode it and render it porous. It is a volume inhabited by voids. It contains a complete and autonomous residential unit — capable of functioning independently when the house is occupied by a single person or a couple — with an open living space on the ground floor, a principal bedroom on the first floor, and a solarium-belvedere on the roof, from which deep views open southward towards Ibiza and the silhouette of La Mola.

The smaller volume, compact and opaque, functions in a complementary way: it houses three en-suite double bedrooms and a guest bathroom. The physical separation between the two bodies allows for independent management of privacy according to occupancy, an arrangement that reveals the project’s programmatic intelligence. Between the two volumes, the connecting element acts as pivot and vestibule: “a permeable gallery that links the most intimate spaces with the exterior and shifts its character with the seasons.” In summer it functions as a ventilated porch; in winter, enclosed, as a greenhouse solar collector.

The lower level — technically a basement, but conceived with an altogether different spatial ambition — houses the library, gymnasium, service areas, and parking. Strategically positioned patios flood these rooms with natural light and create, in the architect’s words, “atmospheres of silent monumentality.” This is one of the project’s most audacious moves: subverting the dark condition of the basement until it becomes one of the most poetically charged spaces in the house.

Sustainability as ethics

The environmental strategy of Ses Clotades would merit a separate analysis, but its greatest virtue is that it proves indistinguishable from the project itself. Castelló states it plainly: it transcends “the simple implementation of technology to become a manifesto that crosses aesthetics in favour of ethics.” On an island with structural water scarcity like Formentera, the management of rainwater is a matter of historical survival, and the house takes up that tradition with a large-volume cistern in the basement. The patios reduce electrical demand by bringing natural light to every level. The lower volume’s roof integrates photovoltaic collection. Cross-ventilation replaces active climate control wherever possible.

The materials follow the same logic: projected natural cork and lime binder for the insulation of the enclosing walls — materials with a minimal ecological footprint that allow the house to breathe — along with iroko and pine carpentry and shutters that will age with the dignity of the surrounding landscape. The materiality, like everything in this project, is an exercise in coherence and restraint.

Art, geometry, and natural matter

The architecture of Ses Clotades has also drawn the attention of artist Elena Vinyàrskaya, whose intervention has given the house “a layer of conscious domesticity.” Vinyàrskaya has acted not only as artist but as curator of the set design: through a selection of her own works, designer furniture pieces, and objects with their own histories, the interior abandons its condition as container to become a stage of textures and meanings. Textiles, ceramics, and props balance the formal purity of the house with the warmth necessary for it to be lived in.

The furniture follows the same principle: many elements have been designed to measure and integrated into the architecture — among them the D12 collection for Diabla — and the knowledge of local craftspeople permeates every detail. The result is a work where “the precision of geometry and the imperfection of natural matter coexist in a silent equilibrium,” as the architect observes.

Rooted in Formentera

Marià Castelló has spent decades building one of the most singular and least conspicuous trajectories in contemporary Spanish architecture. His rootedness in Formentera — a small, fragile island with a cultural and landscape identity of great specificity — has produced a body of work that could hardly have emerged from any other place or any other disposition. Ses Clotades is, in that sense, a work of maturity: the house that only someone who has learned to listen over a long time can build.

Project: Ses Clotades.
Location: Formentera.
Area: 295 m².
Design: 2016-2021. Construction: 2021-2025.
Architect: Marià Castelló.
Site supervision: Lorena Ruzafa + Marià Castelló.
Quantity surveyor: José Luis Velilla Lon.
Structure: Ferran Juan.
Facilities: Alcoitech Climatización.
Design team: Lorena Ruzafa, Marga Ferrer y Natàlia Castellà.
Contractor: Urbafor.
Art & Set Design: Elena Vinyàrskaya.
Photography: Marià Castelló.
Source: Marià Castelló

Marià Castelló

Founded in 2002 in Formentera by Marià Castelló (Ibiza, 1976), the studio operates as a small-scale workshop dedicated to architecture and landscape, with a measured production and a strong bond to the territory. Since 2017, Formentera-born architect Lorena Ruzafa Tur has joined the practice, strengthening an approach that works with Mediterranean light, the rhythms of place, and a sincere materiality that dialogues with the island’s tradition.

Castelló graduated as an architect from ETSAB (UPC) in 2002 with honors. From the outset, his work has been published internationally and was presented at the Venice Biennale (Catalan Pavilion, 2012). Early milestones include the “Emerging Architect” award at the 6th Ibiza and Formentera Architecture Awards (2012), marking a trajectory deeply attentive to the heritage and cultural landscape of Formentera.

The studio’s architecture explores the balance between the telluric and the tectonic, the heavy and the light, the artisanal and the technological. These principles become manifest in residential projects such as Bosc d’en Pep Ferrer—where carved rock coexists with three prefabricated CLT volumes—and Es Pou, a modestly scaled dwelling that is precisely inserted into the historic grid of dry-stone walls on the island. Both projects have been widely published and awarded.

Beyond housing and landscape, the studio has developed public facilities such as the Centre d’Esports Nàutics de Formentera, directed by Marià Castelló and Lorena Ruzafa, which reaffirms an approach to design that is closely attuned to the physical and social context of the archipelago.

Since 2019, Castelló and Ruzafa have been developing Fragments d’Arquitectura, a singular project that reveals another dimension of their creative thinking: pieces that are neither buildings nor models, but rather evocations, memories, geometric poems that bring us closer to the very heart of architecture. An invitation to look with innocence, to pause before the essential beauty of form, matter, and light. The series was presented in an exhibition in 2025 and crystallized in an extensive book of the same name. The project received an Honorable Mention at the Architecture MasterPrize (Conceptual category).

The work of Marià Castelló and Lorena Ruzafa regards the island as a living archive: each project is a precise reading of the terrain, the light, the wind, and local crafts. The economy of resources, the sober tectonics, and the continuity with built memory define an architecture deeply committed to sustainability and to the essential beauty of place.

The brief was a full renovation with two objectives: a well-compartmentalised night zone and a day zone that was open and connected to the outside. Piano Piano added a third, implicit objective: to turn the unavoidable corridor into something more than a passage. The result is called El desfile de la Puri, and in that name coexist the geometry, colour, humour and precision that define the studio.

The corridor as narrative axis

The strategy draws on a bespoke grid whose angles follow those of the existing geometry. The architects accept the site’s constraints rather than correcting them. The new lines organise the programme without forcing the plan, and articulate the separation between day and night through that same corridor which, transformed in its condition, becomes the most compelling space in the entire home. Storage pockets, breathing rooms, natural light, works of art and access to the different rooms all find their place within it. The corridor ceases to be a secondary threshold and becomes the narrative axis of the house.

Interior and exterior

The second objective of the intervention is to blur the boundary between inside and outside. The existing home related timidly to its terrace; the new proposal opens it up entirely. Every space connects to the exterior, and material continuity reinforces that intention: the same ceramic tile covers both the interior and exterior floors, extending the geometric logic of the grid into the open air like a carpet that keeps playing with colour combinations. The boundary between the two worlds, without disappearing, becomes porous.

Bordeaux as the connecting thread

The colour bordeaux runs through the home from end to end. It was the clients themselves who proposed it, and Piano Piano integrated it as the connecting thread of the intervention: from the entrance, splashes of bordeaux accompany the route like pieces of furniture, all the way to the living area where the family gathers each day. Ceramic green and wooden details balance the intensity of that deep red, avoiding saturation and contributing a rhythm that reads through the sequence with its own chromatic music.

The idea of a parade — which gives the project its name — captures precisely this: the sense that the house is in motion, that its materials and geometries follow one another in a purposeful order, that the inhabitants do not merely occupy spaces but move through them in a sequence. The collaboration with muralist Gisela Talita and photographer Milena Villalba adds layers to that reading, bringing into the domestic space a dimension that goes beyond the strictly architectural.

Piano Piano works from a conviction this project makes clear: architecture begins with the place, listens to its constraints and turns them into a point of departure, rather than ignoring or overriding them. A home that was difficult to plan becomes, for that very reason, a memorable one.

Project: El desfile de la Puri.
Type: Reforma integral de vivienda.
Location: El Mercat, València.
Completed: 2025.
Interior Design: Piano Piano. Maria Donnini y Maria Grifo.
Photography: Milena Villalba.
Mural art: Gisela Talita.
Construction company: Recosan Obras y Servicios.
Carpentry: Madentia.
Source: Piano Piano.

Piano Piano

Founded in Valencia in 2016 by Maria Donnini and Maria Grifo—both born in 1988, architects trained at ETSA València with further studies in Lisbon and Genoa—Piano Piano is a studio that understands architecture as a patient journey. A sequence of interlinked decisions that, layer by layer, build the internal logic of each project, always from an analytical, conceptual perspective that remains deeply attentive to what is essential. View full biography.

For centuries, agriculture shaped these hillsides into horizontal platforms — the feixes of the Catalan tradition — that order the terrain, retain the earth and orient the gaze toward the valley. When Bouman takes on the commission, he accepts that pre-existing geography as the project’s point of departure. The site is organised as a sequence of stepped terraces, each with its own use: the vegetable garden, the swimming pool, the parking area, the outdoor terrace. The house occupies the uppermost platform, the widest one, with the best views. From there, the valley opens in its full extent. The implantation extends the order the landscape already had.

Form and energy performance

Bouman designs a square plan. A decision that in another context might seem arbitrary here carries its own justification: compactness reduces the envelope surface relative to the habitable volume, with a direct impact on the building’s energy performance. The pitched roof completes that logic: it adapts the volume to the slope of the terrain, reduces its visual presence in the landscape and organises the interior section into two levels that allow the space beneath the roof to be inhabited with full dignity.

Inside, the central transverse space acts as the backbone of the house: entrance hall, kitchen, living room and dining room follow one another without partitions between them, forming a continuous band that connects the two main façades. The four corners accommodate the bedrooms; the bathroom and laundry room are positioned along the sides. The layout is generous without being excessive; each room has the right amount of space.

Nearly zero energy consumption standards

The energy performance of the house results from the sum of decisions that reinforce one another. Insulation is enhanced throughout the envelope. The aerothermal system handles both climate control and domestic hot water production. The compact form minimises thermal bridges and reduces transmission losses. The whole approaches nearly zero energy consumption standards without seeking certifications that are not, in this case, the goal: beyond a label, efficiency here is a consequence of projective rigour.

Casa Boratuna was selected for the Premis d’Arquitectura de Girona 2025, a recognition that confirms the soundness of a proposal that resolves a demanding domestic programme with both effectiveness and sensitivity in a landscape of great value.

Project: Casa Boratuna.
Typology: vivienda unifamiliar aislada.
Location: Vall del Llémena, Girona.
Completed: 2024.
Architect: Victor Bouman.
Collaborators: RSC Arquitectura, Construccions Marc i Jou, ELKE Windows, Fustech, Rajoleria Quintana, Piscines Blanes.
Photography: Pol Viladoms.
Awards: obra seleccionada, Premis d’Arquitectura de Girona 2025.
Source: Bouman Arquitectura.

Victor Bouman

Víctor Bouman is part of a generation of architects who have turned simplicity into a form of precision and made the landscape their main ally. An architect trained at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB, 2016), his work today unfolds between Girona and the Costa Brava, where he designs quiet, compact homes that are deeply attentive to the climate and to the real lives of those who inhabit them.

In 2020 he founded Bouman Arquitectura, a studio based in Girona and Llançà (Costa Brava) that is defined above all by a calm, straightforward and honest way of working. From these two bases, urban yet very close to the territory, the studio works with private clients and developers on new-build projects, refurbishments, interior design, retail and landscape, guided by a clear thread: creating spaces that are easy to live in, quiet and sustainable, where architecture does not impose itself on life but supports it discreetly. View full biography.

The city grew in the shadow of the monastery of Sant Esteve, founded in the ninth century, and for centuries lived from agriculture and water. The streets of the historic centre preserve an unmistakable medieval character — façades where time has left its mark without anyone rushing to erase it. Banyoles has the quiet quality of places that have never needed to reinvent themselves, that have continued being what they were while the world accelerated around them.

It is in this particular city that interior designer Maite Prats works, and it is difficult not to see in her understanding of space a resonance with the surrounding environment. Here stands the house at the centre of this project — one of those houses that refuses to be erased, that has a way of being in the world, a proportion, a relationship with the street, a manner of receiving morning light, that resists any attempt at substitution. Built in 1929, it had preserved intact a way of living that Prats chose to honour. The name given to the project says everything: Palimpsest — a manuscript written over without fully erasing what came before, where the new text coexists with traces of the old, and that coexistence is precisely what gives it character.

The original house

The intervention unfolds across two distinct volumes. The original house contains shared life: kitchen, dining room, living room, circulation spaces, and a sleeping loft that makes use of the roof’s full height. In this volume, the work consists above all in recovery. Openings and proportions are restored; spaces compressed by the accumulation of time are freed. In the main room, the most radical decision is also the most eloquent. The reed ceiling is removed to expose the original structure — the timber truss that had remained hidden for decades. The section becomes the space itself, and the recovered height multiplies the entry of light and transforms the perception of the volume.

The extension

The extension, new building housing the night zone and service spaces, approaches the historic house with the caution of someone who understands that not every encounter need be an embrace. Between the two volumes a gap remains, a space that allows each to be read independently, making legible what was already there and what has since arrived. The new body does not imitate the language of the original house, nor does it compete with its historicist ornament — the stone balls on the pinnacles, the window mouldings, the worked render — but instead adopts a register of its own: quiet and material. Board-formed concrete with a modulation that echoes the rhythm of the interior paving, lacquered steel joinery, wooden shutters that calibrate the relationship between inside and out.

The garden, heart of the project

The garden is the heart of the project. It is the garden that articulates the sequence between the two buildings, that establishes the route and gives meaning to the existing change in level. That difference in grade, far from being a problem, becomes the instrument that allows semi-subterranean spaces to open toward controlled light, that connects levels through walkways and porches, that makes visible in every movement the relationship between what has been inherited and what has been added. A pool-basin lined with natural stone in a green tone — the same green as the water that inhabits the lake — is integrated among the planting until the boundary between architecture and landscape dissolves. A small pre-existing structure in the courtyard is kept and transformed into a dining room, with bamboo furniture and a large arched door that, when open, turns the exterior into interior in the most natural way.

A precise and coherent materiality

Inside, the materiality is precise and coherent. Oak flooring runs through the main level, establishing a continuity that unites kitchen, dining room, and living room; polished concrete appears in the zones most closely bound to the ground and the garden. In the bathrooms, white tile and a stone skirting construct a clean, enduring atmosphere. The kitchen furniture is designed specifically for the geometry of the space, without seeking prominence. In the loft — that secret space beneath the truss, with its two low beds, its stacked books, and hemp ropes as the only balustrade — the informality is entirely deliberate: a place to inhabit differently, at another scale and in another time.

Palimpsest is a project that trusts in the intelligence of time. It adds layers because the contemporary way of living required it, without erasing traces out of self-consciousness or displaying them out of nostalgia. What remains, in the end, is an architecture that knows where it stands, that knows its own history, and that has decided — with precision and without flourish — how to continue writing it.

Project: Palimpsest.
Location: Banyoles, Girona.
Area: 294 m².
Completed: 2025.
Authorship: Estudi Maite Prats Arquitectura Interior — Maite Prats, interior designer.
Collaborators: Mariana Colmenero, arquitecta; Guillermo Corsunsky, arquitecto; Aurora Gavaldà, arquitecta.
Photography: Marc Torra / Fragments.
Source: Estudi Maite Prats.

Maite Prats

Maite Prats works from Banyoles, in the heart of inland Catalonia, with a practice she has built patiently — from this singular city that has undoubtedly shaped her understanding of space. Trained as an interior designer at the DIAC in Barcelona, she completed a Master’s in Ephemeral Architecture at Elisaba. She founded her studio in 2009 and has led it since as Creative Director, alongside architects Mariana Colmenero, Guillermo Corsunsky, and Aurora Gavaldà.

Each project begins with a careful reading of the place: its proportions, its light, its history. From that reading, Prats works through reduction — stripping away the superfluous to arrive at the essential — with the conviction that the most significant decisions are also the most restrained. Natural light is an element that structures, defines atmospheres, articulates the depth of materials, and gives measure to time. Materials, for their part, are chosen for their honesty and permanence, for their capacity to age with dignity and to establish a sincere relationship with whoever inhabits the space.

Prats pursues coherent ones: places where calm and clarity are conditions of habitability. That ethical orientation is recognisable throughout her work, from residential interventions to the commercial and hospitality projects that form part of her trajectory.

The studio holds a long series of recognitions at the Girona Interior Design Biennial, where it has received awards in successive editions from 1997 to 2024, as well as mentions at the Premios Coac de Girona and a finalist placement at the FAD Interiorismo Awards in 2018. In 2008, her work was included in the publication Minimalisme, la sobrietat en la Arquitectura — a title that could serve as an inadvertent synthesis of her own method.

The villages of the comarca — Hoyos, Gata, Robledillo de Gata, Villasbuenas, San Martín de Trevejo — preserve an almost intact medieval fabric of granite and chestnut-wood houses, colonnaded porches, and a relationship with topography that any architect today would envy. San Martín de Trevejo is perhaps the best known, with its cobbled streets and the presence of fala, a minority Romance language related to Galician-Portuguese still spoken in three villages of the area — a linguistic detail that says much about the isolation that has kept the place as it is. The Sierra de Gata has not experienced the mass tourism or large-scale second-home development that has transformed other Spanish ranges. That carries an economic cost for its inhabitants, but it has preserved intact a way of building and of relating to the landscape that elsewhere disappeared decades ago.

Here, in the Sierra de Gata, stood this construction looking out over the valley, with no one paying it much attention. A former sheep stable with rough-hewn stone walls set in earthen mortar, a curved clay-tile roof, and austere proportions dictated by use and climate — nothing more rhetorical than the work itself. Ábaton found it this way, recognised it for what it was — a piece of vernacular architecture with a character of its own — and decided that the renovation should begin with respect.

The Madrid-based studio has long been developing an understanding of intervention on existing buildings that goes beyond material salvage. More than preserving the stone or reusing the tiles, it means taking sides with the constructive logic of the place: accepting that those who built the stable knew exactly what they were doing when they sited it on that hillside overlooking the oak grove, when they chose the orientation or settled on the thickness of the walls. The renovation of Holm Oak Estate departs from that recognition: the position is right, the structure makes sense, the materials exist in the territory. What changes is the inhabitant and, with them, the relationship between inside and out.

The most significant structural transformation was the opening. The stable was, like all of its kind, a dark and inward-looking construction: light and warmth stayed within, nature remained outside. Ábaton reversed that order.

From the dining area, the opening onto the terrace and pool dissolves any boundary between inhabited space and landscape; beyond, the sierra’s ridgeline occupies the horizon as naturally as the objects on the table. In the bedrooms, floor-level windows frame the oak grove from the bed. The exterior is not the view here — it is the argument.

To accommodate the programme of a single-family home — three bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, an integrated living area, and a main bedroom and bathroom — without distorting the original massing, the project added a second floor tucked into one of the volumes. This addition lifts the main bedroom and bathroom above the rest, separating them physically and visually while offering the best views over the sierra. The extension respects the scale of the whole: it follows the pitch of the roof, maintains the same material logic, and disappears among the existing volumes when seen from the meadow.

The communal area — dining room, living room, and kitchen — occupies one of the original volumes as a single room, fully open to the exterior through large sliding panels. A freestanding white-bodied fireplace organises the transition between zones without raising partitions. The kitchen, set further back, holds the most domestic character of the ensemble: stone worktops, reclaimed timber joinery, exposed rubblestone at the back wall, and a lacquered red range that introduces a note of strong colour among all that limestone. The carved granite sinks — in the lateral bedrooms’ bathrooms as much as in the principal suite — are pieces drawn directly from the local quarry, with no more transformation than necessary. The material does not disguise itself.

The entrance hall is the space where dialogue with history becomes most explicit: the original stone mixed with local earth remains visible in the lower part of the wall, while the upper surfaces are whitewashed with the finish the studio considers its own. The staircase rising to the second floor resolves that same crossing with technical elegance: the base is exposed brick — reclaimed, rough, weighted with time — while the treads are thin sheet-metal blades that ascend without mass, barely touching. Rusticity and contemporaneity coexist.

The bathrooms continue that conversation between materials. In the principal suite, the screen disappears and the bathroom volume merges with the bedroom: travertine vanity, exposed stone wall, sloped timber ceiling. Others opt for olive-green mosaic tiles lining bath and shower walls, a colour that takes the hillside visible through the window. In another, the sink is a block of carved pink granite — the same granite that appears in the oldest constructions of the comarca. The bathroom as geological extension of the place.

Energy efficiency and sustainability

The commitment to energy efficiency was addressed with the same discretion: thermal insulation integrated into the envelope and photovoltaic panels to cover consumption, without any of these decisions altering the exterior reading of the building. Sustainability here is part of the ethics of an intervention that decides not to build beyond what is necessary.
The interior design and furnishing extend the tone of the project: craft pieces and contemporary design coexist with reclaimed antique furniture, kilim rugs, and linen and esparto textiles. The faded blue of an old sideboard against the exposed stone of the dining room; the solid wood table with rush and esparto chairs; the green-painted coffee table in the living room, aged to the point of forgetting when it was new. The house works as a refuge that has accumulated objects slowly, without decorative haste — and that is exactly what it looks like.

To arrive at Holm Oak Estate is to arrive in a territory where architecture still has memory. The oak grove surrounding the property is an ecosystem that predates the stable by centuries, and will outlast Ábaton’s intervention long after it has acquired the patina it still lacks.

Project: Holm Oak Estate
Location: Sierra de Gata. Cáceres.

Completed: 
2024.
Architecture and Interiors: Ábaton
.
Photography: 
Derek Pedrós.
Source: Ábaton.

Ábaton

Since its foundation in 1998, Ábaton has established itself as one of Spain’s most influential architecture studios. Its work, renowned for its formal honesty and conceptual depth, is guided by a clear philosophy: to eliminate the superfluous in order to reach the essential. For Ábaton, architecture is not only a matter of space, but a form of intimate conversation —with oneself, with others, and with nature. View full biography.