The creative office Bate, run by architects Álvaro Carroquino and José Antonio Miguel, has made a name for itself treating architecture as a brand communication tool, with retail, hospitality and ephemeral architecture projects for firms such as Adidas, Mango and Bimba y Lola. Casa Lola is its first residential architecture project and, precisely for that reason, works as something more than a home, it is the domestic manifesto of a studio that had until now put its method at the service of other brands and that here applies it, for the first time, to its own story.
Located in Moralzarzal, about 40 minutes from Madrid and set against the sierra, Casa Lola is the 260 m² single-family home that José Antonio Miguel, co-founder of Bate, has built together with his partner, designer Ana Manuela Mejía. It is an exercise in architectural self-promotion. The house reflects, without intermediaries, the creative and personal concerns of those who inhabit it, and that alone has been enough to make Casa Lola one of the most talked-about residential projects of the past year in architecture magazines.
Two geometries, one symbol
The project starts from two elementary shapes, a cylinder that acts as a base and, resting on it, a prism with the classic silhouette of a gabled roof, the most primary image that exists of a house, the one anyone would draw as a child. “We were interested in working with pure geometric forms capable of turning the house into a recognizable symbol without falling into ornamental eccentricities” the architects say.
The circular base answers the goal of occupying the maximum buildable area allowed without giving up the garden, which surrounds the house without interruption and multiplies the vanishing points toward the sierra landscape.
The architects openly cite the ‘Duck House’ theory formulated by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, in which the form of a building explicitly expresses its function. “Casa Lola presents its function explicitly through its gabled roof, a simple extruded prism that shouts home, while its interior becomes a space for encounter, fun and interaction with its surroundings” says Álvaro Carroquino.
The challenge, the studio admits, was in managing the tension between that almost archetypal façade and the interior experience. “On a creative level, the most complicated thing has been minimizing the design extras, working with pure geometric forms that made the house a simple symbol on the outside, while the interior is complex enough to have the personality that the passage of time can give to every corner” the architects say.
A house without doors or hallways
That complexity unfolds, above all, indoors. Casa Lola has no doors or hallways, spaces are not separated by walls, but through changes of level, platforms and transitions that let light and circulation run through the house continuously.
The circular plan reinforces that sense of continuity. By eliminating corners and conventional hallways, circulation itself becomes part of the habitable space, and the eye almost always keeps a visual relationship with other areas of the house.
The circular base concentrates the most public area of the house: kitchen and living room around the fireplace, plus two flexible bedrooms for guests. The upper volume, the one that takes on the silhouette of a ‘house’, is organized on three levels: a more private living room with views of the sierra, a bathroom completely open to the outside in walls and ceiling, and the main bedroom. The three platforms give access to the roof of the circular base, turned into a terrace over the garden.
An architecture designed to change
Behind this organization is an underlying idea about how a house should age. “Functionality does not start from defining each space in too closed a way, but rather from avoiding excessive compartmentalizing. We were interested in the house being able to change over time and its inhabitants gradually appropriating it in ways that perhaps were not foreseen from the start” says José Antonio Miguel.
It is an architecture that, according to its own authors, understands flexibility as the capacity not to remain closed within a single solution. “Life changes, and the house has to be able to accompany those changes without the need for radical transformations”
The interior as counterpoint
Against the geometric rigor of the exterior, inside the house, stands a decoration that works as a warm counterpoint: continuous surfaces and a neutral range of materials give way to the objects that its inhabitants have incorporated over time. Art —very present through Ana Manuela Mejía’s relationship with the world of galleries— coexists with original furniture from Bogotá in guayacán wood and with more contemporary pieces. The house is thus built from mixture, use and time.
The result is a house that, seen from outside, recalls the most elementary drawing of a home and that, inside, proposes a way of life freer and less predictable than its silhouette promises. Casa Lola is not just the first house signed by Bate, it is the demonstration, on a domestic scale, of everything the studio has argued until now in its projects for other brands, that architecture, above all, is a medium for telling a story.
Project: Casa Lola.
Location: Moralzarzal (Madrid).
Completed: 2024.
Architecture: Bate.
Architects: José Antonio Miguel y Álvaro Carroquino.
Photography: Borja Llobregat.
Bate
Bate is a creative office founded in Madrid in 2021 by architects Álvaro Carroquino (Gijón, 1991) and José Antonio Miguel (Madrid, 1991). Trained at Universidad CEU San Pablo, both have spent more than a decade developing a way of understanding architecture that remains deliberately apart from its conventional circuits.
“Brands no longer want you to look at them. They want you to walk in, to stay, and, above all, to share it. In this shift, where experience has replaced the conventional campaign, physical space has become a new language. It is no longer about designing shops or events, but about building stories that can be inhabited. That is where Bate comes in — a design studio led by architects that is redefining how brands exist in the real world. Space stops being a container and becomes a message,” the architects explain.
The studio works across architecture, design and creative direction, developing spaces, objects and experiences for brands and institutions: retail, hospitality, workspace, installation and ephemeral architecture projects. Names such as Adidas, Mango, Bimba y Lola, VIPS and Mr Boho, together with venues such as the restaurant Laveintiocho, Lazo Café and the Burger Jazz chain, form part of a portfolio that understands architecture as a digital and physical medium of communication. Each project starts from an idea and translates it into a recognizable physical experience.
Against the industry’s usual logic, in which design is treated as a phase prior to execution, Bate integrates concept, technical development and production within a single process, retaining control of the project from its initial conception through to construction. Every formal, material or budgetary decision is part of the same system: here, designing means taking on constructive complexity, not delegating it.
That same rigor —inherited from the discipline of architecture and translated into systemic thinking, technical control and attention to detail— is also applied to the most ephemeral projects, even those that last only a few days. Under this outlook, ephemeral architecture stops being stage design and becomes strategy: a pop-up is no longer just a temporary place, but a tool for building identity, generating content and activating community.
Behind this approach lies a universe of references built deliberately from outside conventional architecture: product design, the Apple universe of the 2000s, the editorial legacy of Domus, cinema and fashion shows coexist within an approach that favors well-thought-out systems over passing aesthetics. The result, difficult to pin down, is what its own founders describe as a new way of thinking about design: more hybrid, more strategic and more attuned to how brands —and, as their first residential project shows, people too— want to exist today.
Alongside Bate, both architects run parallel projects that extend this same territory: Bate Social Store, a space in Madrid that blurs the physical boundaries between culture, style and art, conceived to generate connections and unique experiences; and CMMV.group, through which they help brands differentiate themselves by designing relationships with their audience. Both also combine their professional practice with teaching: they lead experimental projects and production workshops at IED Istituto Europeo di Design, and have taught at Dmad and Escuela TAI, passing on their hybrid vision of the discipline to new generations of architects and designers.
Álvaro Carroquino
Álvaro Carroquino (Gijón, 1991) is an architect trained at Universidad CEU San Pablo (2011–2017). Co-founder and creative director of Bate, he also serves as creative director of CMMV.group and as creative development director of Tapa Relationship Spaces. Since 2018 he has taught at IED Madrid and directed Experimental Projects at IED Visual Arts Madrid. He taught at Escuela TAI (2022–2024). His profile combines architectural practice with a sustained teaching activity.
José Antonio Miguel
José Antonio Miguel (Madrid, 1991), architect trained at Universidad CEU San Pablo (2009–2016). Co-founder of Bate and head of Bate Social Store, he combines his work at the studio with teaching on the IED’s Master’s in Creative Direction for Commercial Spaces and on Dmad’s Official University Master’s in Design and Architecture. Before founding Bate, he worked as a content writer for Souvenir Magazine.
Together with his partner, designer Ana Manuela Mejía, linked to the world of art galleries, José Antonio Miguel signs Casa Lola: the studio’s first residential architecture project and, to date, his most personal undertaking.
Project by Bate
