The house had existed since 1953. A small square volume in Dénia — load-bearing walls, two central pillars, a four-pitched ceramic tile roof over a timber structure — that over decades had accumulated extensions, partition walls and dropped ceilings until it lost the form and scale that had originally defined it. When Ascoz Arquitectura began the intervention, the dwelling had been reduced to a succession of dark, compartmentalised rooms affected by damp. This house had stopped breathing.
The project starts from a simple question that guides every decision: what lies beneath? The answer was in the structure. Under the dropped ceilings, two solid brick pillars and timber trusses supported a four-pitched roof that reached nearly five metres at its highest point. That geometry — intact and latent — was already the house the project wanted to build. The intervention begins with a gesture of revelation: stripping away what had been added to uncover the beauty of the original.
A large, light-filled living space
The generous day area — living room, dining room and kitchen — now occupies the original 80 m² volume, undivided, open from side to side and crowned by the exposed timber structure. The removal of the dropped ceilings transforms the spatial experience entirely: the same floor plan that previously read as a succession of small rooms becomes a single space of nearly five metres in height, where light pours in from above and the two whitewashed brick pillars act as vertical references that organise the space without enclosing it. The kitchen, which in previous extensions had been pushed to the periphery, returns to the heart of the home and integrates into the continuity of the shared space.
The opening in the south-facing slope of the roof is the project’s second structural gesture. Designed according to the solar path, it allows direct light to enter in winter and excludes it in summer, passively regulating the interior temperature while resolving the chronic damp that had affected the house. The result is a space that shifts throughout the day and across the seasons: morning light skims in through the original east-facing windows, the overhead skylight fills the midday hours with brightness, and the afternoon slides across the timber and brick until the space gathers itself inward.
The annexe modules added in previous decades are reorganised as the night and service zone: master bedroom, guest room, two bathrooms and a laundry. The distinction between day and night space develops a domestic logic in which each part of the house responds to a different time and intensity. The 40 m² covered porch is now the element that connects interior and garden: an intermediate space that is exterior in its openness and domestic in its scale, where Mediterranean life settles naturally for most of the year.
Honesty of materials
The material palette is consistent with the project’s intent. The solid brick of the pillars — whitewashed but visible in its texture — enters into dialogue with oak timber floors and the sandy tones of the surfaces. White joinery unifies the openings. The kitchen, in lacquered white with a continuous worktop, brings contemporary precision to the historic space. Wicker lamps distributed throughout the interior and the porch introduce details of artisanal warmth. The result is an interior built on the honesty of materials and the coherence of the palette: each element carries function and presence without need for explanation.
From the outside, the house remains unchanged: the four-pitched ceramic tile roof, the white volume, the 1953 massing. The rehabilitation of Casa Iuno unfolds above all inward — in the spatial experience, the quality of light, the relationship between house and garden, and in the way those who inhabit it will come to recognise themselves within it. As architect Damián Ascoz explains: “We wanted to open, illuminate and reveal the beauty that was already there, hidden beneath layers, dropped ceilings and partitions.” What the intervention returns to the house is, precisely, the possibility of being inhabited at its full scale.
Project: Casa Iuno.
Location: Dénia. Alicante
Area: 130 m² + 40 m² de porch
Completed: 2025.
Interior Architecture: Ascoz Arquitectura.
Architect: Damián Ascoz Carrió.
Contractor: Procsa.
Photography: Alejandro Gómez Vives.
Source: Lelien.
Damián Ascoz Carrió
Damián Ascoz Carrió is an architect and founder of Ascoz Arquitectura, a Valencia-based studio that has built its identity around a conviction as simple as it is demanding: that architecture only makes sense when it is enjoyed in the making, and that this enjoyment is, in itself, a guarantee of quality. With over twenty-five years of experience across all areas of building and urban planning, Ascoz has developed a practice that brings equal attention to the technical dimension of a project and to the human needs of those who will inhabit it.
He trained as an architect at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), where he built a solid grounding in construction that has shaped his understanding of the project ever since: as a process that is at once technical and human, where structural rigour and active listening to the client are inseparable. After graduating, he began his professional career in 1999, accumulating broad and varied experience — residential architecture, urban planning, building at every scale — that allowed him to develop his own perspective on contemporary practice and to define what kind of studio he wanted to found.
Curiosity, enthusiasm and a deep commitment to doing things well are the qualities that define Ascoz in both his personal and professional life. His interest in nature, art, music and cinema naturally feeds his sensibility as an architect: an attentive gaze toward the world around him, which translates into projects capable of listening to what each commission needs before proposing any solution. That attitude — open, curious, committed — is also what shapes the day-to-day workings of the studio and its relationship with clients.
Ascoz Arquitectura
Ascoz Arquitectura was born out of a particular way of understanding the profession: with time, with enthusiasm and with the will to enjoy it. Founded by Damián Ascoz, the studio has developed from the outset around three principles that serve simultaneously as a design criterion and as a commitment to clients: simplicity, harmony and material honesty. Materials must be natural, noble and honest — a conviction that extends to the way the studio works and to the relationships it builds with all the parties involved in its projects.
That way of working is, in fact, one of the studio’s most defining qualities. Ascoz Arquitectura actively brings the client and all the trades involved in the build — the contractor, the engineering consultants, the carpenters, the metalworkers — into the creative and operational process. A horizontal, inclusive practice that lies at the heart of an architecture defined above all by its authenticity.
Ascoz Arquitectura
Carrer els Pedrenyals
46450 València
ascozarquitectura.es
@ascoz_arquitectura
Project by Damián Ascoz Carrió
