Founded in Valencia in 2020 by David Puerta and María Daroz, Viruta Lab grows out of two personal paths that eventually merge into a single way of designing. He arrives at architecture through drawing, after years of sketching ideas straight onto walls before learning how to build them; she arrives through classical ballet, a discipline that gives her a sense of proportion, rigour and attention to detail that she later carries into space. The studio’s own name, tied to the wood shavings left behind by manual craft, sums up that vocation: architecture understood as a craftsman’s process, made of sketch, material and time, rather than as a closed result.

The studio works across residential, contract, retail and ephemeral projects, always through active listening and close teamwork with the client. Each commission starts from a basic idea — often, quite literally, a line drawn on paper — which Viruta Lab translates into programme, material and constructive detail until it becomes a lived-in space. The firm holds emotion as architecture’s ultimate purpose: organic, warm, timeless projects designed so that whoever inhabits the space recognises something of their own in it.

That sensibility has a double root. María Daroz’s training in Denmark brings the rigour and refinement of Scandinavian design into the studio, which blends with the Mediterranean character of Valencia, the city where both partners have built their careers. The result is a language of its own, recognisable through its handling of natural light, noble materials and a warm palette that appeals to the senses, applied by the studio at the domestic scale of a home as much as on larger-scale projects.

María Daroz is an architect from the Universitat Politècnica de València, with a year of postgraduate training at the Arkitektskolen in Aarhus, Denmark. Before founding Viruta Lab, she coordinated the architectural projects department at Ramón Esteve Estudio, worked as an architect at DMG Arquitectura, served as Retail & Product Project Manager at CuldeSac, and led the projects department at Casas inHAUS. In 2019 she set up Viruta Lab together with David Puerta. “Dance gave me the discipline and elegance reflected in my sensitivity to detail,” she says of the link between her training and her way of designing, which combines geometric proportion with a particular attraction to light and to materials worked with sophistication.

David Puerta is an architect from the Universitat Politècnica de València, specialised in Heritage Intervention, and an interior designer from EASD Valencia. His career includes Studio Zone, Moncly Interioristas  and Ximo Roca Diseño, as well as heading the interior design department at Casas inHAUS before joining Viruta Lab. For him, drawing is the origin of everything else: “Architecture became a way of continuing to create, of searching for new forms and, above all, of sharing my emotions with people.” That draughtsman’s eye underpins his understanding of a project, from the first sketch to the final interior design detail.