El desfile de la Puri: a renovation project by Piano Piano that turns the corridor into the narrative axis of the home

When Maria Donnini and Maria Grifo — founders of Piano Piano — first visited this apartment, they knew they were facing a very particular geometry: a narrow, elongated home in the El Mercat neighbourhood of València, organised around a corridor with no right angles that, far from easing the layout, conditioned it from the outset.

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.

Project by Piano Piano