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.

Getting here was not a straight path.

Painting at the beginning

Natalia’s first years of artistic practice were defined by painting on canvas with mixed techniques. She exhibited in Colombia and the United States, accumulated experience and recognition. And yet, something never quite settled.

“Although my work today is centred on vessels and organic sculptures, my beginnings in art were tied to painting on canvas using mixed techniques. Yet despite years exploring that path, there was a constant sense of dissatisfaction with the final result of my work.”

That discomfort — that honesty with herself — would become, in time, the starting point for everything that followed. Natalia paused her artistic practice to dedicate herself to interior design, a pause that lasted years and which, far from being a renunciation, turned out to be a quiet school. Working with spaces, proportions, and materials refined in her a sensibility she would later recognise as essential to her sculptural work.

The discovery: a vessel she could not take with her

The return to art came unexpectedly, through teaching. And it was in that context — teaching, exploring materials alongside her students — that Natalia rediscovered something she had briefly touched in her adolescence: volume, three-dimensionality, the possibility that form could exist in space and not only on a surface.

“My first approach to sculpture happened many years ago, during secondary school, when I had the opportunity to work with clay and make some three-dimensional pieces. After that experience, I never returned to sculpture — until much later, when volume came back into my life in a completely unexpected way, through paper.”

The trigger was concrete, almost incidental: during a trip, she found a vessel that captivated her and that she could not bring home. The impossibility of having it led her to try to recreate it.

“In attempting to recreate it by my own means, I began experimenting with a papier-mâché paste, not imagining that this moment would mark the beginning of a new artistic chapter. What started as an intuitive experiment ended up revealing to me a medium with infinite possibilities for expression.”

Four years on, that experiment has become a sustained and rigorous sculptural practice.

Paper, a material that challenges its own limits

Papier-mâché has an undeserved reputation. It is associated with the provisional, with fragility. Natalia works precisely against that inertia: she transforms paper into something dense, tactile, structural. The starting point is cardboard, processed and combined with other elements until she achieves a malleable paste capable of holding complex forms while remaining responsive to touch and gesture.

“Although paper has historically been associated with the ephemeral or the artisanal, for me it has become a sophisticated sculptural medium full of possibilities. Each piece is born from a slow, intuitive process, built through layers, fragments, and textures that evolve organically during its making. I use no moulds and reproduce no designs; each work exists as an unrepeatable piece with its own identity.”

The process includes phases of drying, carving, and adjustment that can extend over long working sessions. The resulting surfaces retain the traces of their making: fibres, tonal variations, slight irregularities that are not flaws but evidence of the process — marks of a concrete human presence.

“For approximately four years I have been dedicated to exploring the sculptural possibilities of paper, developing pieces that challenge conventional forms and sit between art, design, and interior architecture. Through vessels, organic sculptures, and works made entirely by hand, I create unique pieces characterised by imperfect volumes, tactile surfaces, and an aesthetic that conveys strength and vulnerability at the same time.”

The creative process: a meditative and deeply intimate act

Natalia’s pieces carry no predetermined message; they do not illustrate an idea or embody a concept before they are made. They are born from the process itself. And that process — long and solitary — has a quality she describes with precision.

“Although the pieces I create do not necessarily begin with the intention of representing a specific meaning, I can say that the process of making each one inevitably becomes a deeply introspective experience. From the initial design to the final layer of finish, each work arises from an almost meditative state in which I face the creative process alone — with the demands of the material and with the unique challenges that each piece sets before me.”

The long hours of construction and transformation are not merely technical: they are also a space for oblique thought, for questions that surface without being sought.

“During those long hours of construction, texture, and transformation, questions about the inner self, identity, and my relationship with the world around me arise constantly. Rather than seeking to convey a literal message, my work ends up being the reflection of an emotional and sensory experience lived in the very act of creating. It is precisely that intuitive connection between matter, emotion, and personal exploration that gives my pieces an organic and deeply human presence.”

This introspective dimension explains something felt in her pieces before it can be named: the sense that they have been inhabited before they were finished, that they carry within them a time and a presence that is not only technical.

Art and space in continuous dialogue

Natalia’s background in interior design is not an incidental biographical detail. It is in the DNA of her work. Her pieces are not objects placed in a space; they are objects conceived to enter into dialogue with it, to transform it gently from within.

“My work speaks naturally to contemporary interior design. The pieces possess a sculptural presence that transforms spaces, bringing materiality, depth, and a sense of human connection to minimalist and organic environments.”

Her collections bring together vessels in different formats, wall pieces, and sculptures conceived as singular objects — not decorative in any superficial sense, but atmospheric: capable of shifting the emotional temperature of a space and giving it character. Her works are part of private collections in Australia, Belgium, Mexico, and Switzerland, and each piece includes a certificate of authenticity that underlines its condition as a unique work.

A practice in constant expansion

Natalia is currently working on a new collection that continues and extends what she has built so far.

“I am currently finishing a new collection in which I continue to deepen my exploration of papier-mâché as the primary material, while experimenting with the incorporation of new elements and materialities that allow me to expand the expressive and sculptural possibilities of my work even further. This new phase represents a natural evolution of my creative process and an ongoing search to discover new relationships between texture, volume, matter, and form.”

She is also developing new collections of large-format sculptures and vessels, deepening her research into paper as a contemporary artistic medium.

“I have developed a deeply personal sculptural language, in which papier-mâché ceases to be an everyday material and becomes an exploration of form, texture, and emotion.”

Natalia Correa’s journey has not been linear, but viewed in perspective it is coherent at every turn. There are artists who find their language by searching for it. There are others who find it by getting lost. Natalia belongs to this second category, and that is felt in the depth of her work.

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.

Two volumetric systems

The starting point is the formation of a new home. The architects read in that circumstance an opportunity to work with the geometry of bonds: union and individuality, the shared and the personal. The house translates this into two volumetric systems that coexist in productive tension.

A white ring runs along the perimeter of the ground floor, embraces the garden, deforms to respect the pre-existing vegetation and projects its cantilevered roof over the exterior space, providing visual and solar protection for the interior spaces and their occupants. It is an ultra-lightweight steel structure, capable of the continuous, fluid gesture that contemporary construction systems allow.

Above and from it, the second-floor volumes, built with a light steel frame, rise tall and compact, clad in artisanal clay brick and recycled tiles recovered from local artisans.

The narrative function of materiality

The choice of materials carries a narrative function. The bricks evoke the kilns disappearing from the immediate context and connect with the Andean building tradition of massive, opaque, weighty volumes. The white ring develops the opposite register — light, continuous, open to the garden and the sky — and the house works with that difference as if the two systems needed each other to make sense.
The interior materiality maintains the same purposeful austerity. Polished concrete floors run through the ground floor with continuity and tactile coolness; the concrete structure gives way to steel on the upper level, lighter in both behaviour and appearance. The cantilevered stair treads organise the transition between floors with a sculptural presence that natural light, filtered through skylights, amplifies throughout the day.

The garden

The garden, designed by Lorena Velasco, densifies the exterior space with vegetation growing between the folds of the ring and around the pre-existing trees, making the outdoor route an indistinguishable part of daily life.

Casa Dominga totals 450 square metres of built area on a 1,000 sqm plot. A domestic scale that the project manages with precision: what the house offers those who move through it is a density of decisions within a contained surface.

Project: Casa Dominga.
Type: Single-family house.
Location: Puembo, Ecuador.
Built area: 450 m².
Plot area: 1.000 m².
Completed: 2025.
Architecture: Nicolás&Nicolás. Architects: Nicolás Vivas y Nicolás López.
Landscape design: Lorena Velasco.
Site manager: Ing. Willan Mora.
Concrete structure: Argu Projects.
Steel structure: Simetrika.
Structural engineering: Vanegas Martinez.
Hydraulic engineering: Ing. Diego Tello.
Electrical engineering: Ing. Jorge Gomez.
Drawings: Gabriela Velasteguí – Nicolás Rosero.
Photography: JAG Studio.
Source: Nicolás&Nicolás.

Nicolas&Nicolas

Nicolas&Nicolas is a contemporary architecture and design studio founded in Quito in 2017 by architects Nicolás Vivas and Nicolás López Ayoub. Based between the Ecuadorian capital and Barcelona, the studio operates from a singular position: that of two professionals trained in Latin America and Europe who engage with their cultural heritage without being defined by it. Their practice spans architecture, interior design and object design, united by a consistent attitude: the dialogue between memory and innovation, between the local and the universal.

The studio pursues an integrated approach to design, working across scales from architecture to the object, through interiors, textile design and art. That breadth of scope is coherence, not eclecticism — a conviction that a well-resolved space is one that addresses all its layers at once. Their projects, developed primarily in Ecuador and Spain, reflect a commitment to material quality, environmental awareness and durability as a form of resistance to the ephemeral.

Nicolás Vivas

Nicolás Vivas graduated with honours in Architecture from Universidad San Francisco de Quito in 2012 and completed his training with a Master’s in Industrial Design for Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano between 2016 and 2017. Before founding Nicolas&Nicolas, he built a solid career in Ecuador and the United States: nearly eight years as a senior architect and project designer at Estudio A0 in Quito, a formative period at the acclaimed Californian practice Brooks + Scarpa Architects in Los Angeles, and a further stint at Contract Workplaces focused on workplace design. That accumulation of scales and geographies — the landscape-informed architecture of the American West Coast, the technical rigour of Milan, the specificity of the Ecuadorian context — defines a sensibility capable of moving between references without losing its own thread.

Nicolás López Ayoub

Nicolás López Ayoub studied Architecture at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, where he first met Vivas, and went on to complete a Master’s in Design and Product Innovation at IED Spain in Madrid in 2019. His professional path led him to Teresa Sapey + Partners in Madrid, a firm known for its chromatic and sensory approach to large-scale interiors, before joining Nicolas&Nicolas full-time from Barcelona in 2020. His independent work — which includes interior projects in Madrid, Valencia and Quito, among them the transformation of a colonial house into a boutique hotel in the historic centre of the Ecuadorian capital — reveals an architecture attentive to atmosphere and the narrative of place. Based in Barcelona, where he also collaborates with 118 Studio, López Ayoub serves as a bridge between the studio’s Latin American practice and its European context.

In that urban context, on the top floor of a building in Argüelles, sits this 78-square-metre flat with a 12-square-metre east-facing terrace, renovated by Gon Architects.

The brief

Toni, the flat’s owner, is an aeronautical project manager, journalist and passionate follower of pop culture. He came to Gon Architects with a double desire, precise and ambitious: to inhabit the interior of an artwork and to design the place where he would live definitively. A home built to stay.

The Madrid studio, led by Gonzalo Pardo, received a floor plan shaped like a tube — 18 metres long and barely 3.5 metres at its narrowest point. The original layout followed an inherited domestic logic: a dark corridor running along the party wall that distributed access to isolated, independent rooms. A configuration that recalls historical models where circulation acted as a device of segregation rather than as inhabitable space.

The strategy

The key to the project lies in the apparently simple decision to replace the logic of the partition with the logic of the filter. A system of floor-to-ceiling sliding doors, executed in different materials, textures and colours, transforms the former corridor into an open, continuous sequence. Depending on the position of these mobile planes, the rooms connect or separate, compress or expand. The house functions as a living organism that accompanies Toni’s daily rituals and those of his dog Kea.

The project also incorporates a large diagonal that restructures the circulation. The entrance — which occurs at the most private end of the flat — becomes the beginning of a journey that dissolves the boundaries between rooms. Doors and passageways cease to act as barriers of hierarchy and become mediators of encounter and spatial ambiguity, a reading that connects with the historian Robin Evans’s theses on domestic connectivity.

The four volumes

The chromatic and material transition unfolds through four concatenated volumes that structure the most intimate part of the flat. The first is a Klein blue box attached to the entrance, housing the bathroom. The second contains the bedroom and dressing room, sheltered behind the warmth of large timber frames and ribbed glass that filter light without fully closing the space. The third, in green, corresponds to the shower. The fourth is the kitchen: a yellow volume that functions simultaneously as the domestic activity hub and a vantage point from which Toni can survey the entire living area.
Beyond that yellow ceramic filter, the space opens up. The living room, dining room and a small work corner merge into a large shared space where furniture acts as architectural infrastructure: shelves that organise, tables that define, objects that accumulate pop culture without losing order.

The terrace as continuation of the interior

The sequence continues on the terrace. Gon Architects conceives it as an exterior room open to the Madrid sky — the last room in the house, where the boundary between domestic interior and urban landscape becomes irrelevant. From there, the rooftops of Argüelles and the morning light from the east confirm that this flat has become a comfortable and liveable home.

Project: Casa JAM.
Location: Argüelles neighbourhood. Madrid.
Completed: 2026.
Built area: 78 m².
Architecture: Gon Architects.
Lead architect: Gonzalo Pardo.
Design team: Carol Linares, María Cecilia Cordero, Sara Mordt, Maria Konstantinidou, Alexandra Marouda.
Construction: Redo Construcción.
Photography: Imagen Subliminal (Rocío R. Rivas + Miguel de Guzmán).

Gon Architects

In the shifting landscape of contemporary Spanish architecture, Gon Architects emerges as a workshop of experimentation, sensibility and generosity: a practice based in Madrid, founded and led by Gonzalo Pardo since 2014.

Gonzalo Pardo, who graduated in 2007 from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM), earned his PhD in Architecture in 2016 with the thesis “Body and Home: Towards the Contemporary Domestic Space through the Transformations of the Kitchen and the Bathroom in the West”, awarded Cum Laude, the Extraordinary Doctoral Thesis Prize 2016–2017, and an Honourable Mention in the Arquia Foundation competition.

This intellectual background—profound and reflective—does not look to the past as an act of reverence, but rather as a platform from which Pardo ventures to reinvent the contemporary habitat with both boldness and delicacy. His studio understands architecture as a complex creative process, where meticulous observation and the care for detail merge with a playful, experimental, critical and optimistic gaze towards our present time.  View full biography.

The commission came from Adam and Julia, a couple who, after years spent between London and New York, chose Barcelona to settle down. They wanted a home designed for sharing and entertaining friends, where urban energy could coexist with a more unhurried way of living. That specific brief shapes every decision in the project.

Original elements preserved

The intervention preserves the original features: the Catalan vaulted ceilings remain exposed, and the arched walnut joinery is integrated into the whole as part of the home’s own architectural language. Àbag Studio works from the building’s identity, adding a new layer that extends its reading and gives it continuity.

The palette is almost monochromatic. Travertine, microcement, walnut and raw linen form a neutral, warm base onto which two pieces of greater chromatic intensity are introduced: the Julep sofas by Tacchini, in emerald green velvet, which visually organise the living room with their soft, substantial volume; and the green onyx, selected directly from the quarry by the studio, which appears in the bathrooms as the densest material in the scheme.

The living area brings together kitchen, dining room and sitting room in a fluid continuum. The kitchen takes the form of a sculptural piece: relief-textured wooden panels, a travertine island with rounded corners, a continuous Pavidnus floor finish. A suspended fireplace, designed with Barcelona studio Marlot Baus, defines the focal point of the space and organises it without dividing it.

Exposed interior architecture

Part of the interior architecture remains intentionally exposed. Àbag Studio incorporates the structural as a compositional element, modulated here with organic forms and warm materials. Linen curtains by Gancedo filter natural light and reinforce the domestic, unhurried character of the space. The apartment also extends outward through a terrace and a balcony with open views over Barcelona.

In the main suite, a freestanding bathtub framed by an arch opens onto a sauna and hammam. The bathrooms are clad in green onyx with Hotbath copper fittings, where the material intensity reaches its peak. Stone-clad wardrobes, made by specialist craftspeople, and a set of domestic-scale decisions — among them a corner designed for Julia’s cats, discreetly integrated into the architecture — give the private zone its most distinctive character.

The project incorporates commissioned works alongside Galería Alzueta and artist Stan Van Steendam, and on the terrace a Nolla mosaic designed specifically for the home revisits local ceramic tradition with a contemporary vocabulary. Lighting by Flos, Santa & Cole and Foscarini, and pieces from brands such as Ferm Living, Hay and Sarah Lavoine complete an interior where every element reflects a considered choice.

The Córcega project builds its case through the accumulation of precise decisions. In this home, every material, every form and every scale has a reason that the project makes legible. The result is a contemporary Mediterranean interior — open, sensorial and well executed — reflecting the standard of interior design that Abel Pérez Gabucio has made his own.

Project: Córcega, Barcelona.

Type: Vivienda privada.
Studio: Àbag Studio.
Creative direction: Abel Pérez Gabucio.
Main materials: Travertine, green onyx, microcement, solid walnut Flooring: Pavidnus.
Custom furniture: Marlot Baus.
Furniture: Tacchini, Flos, Santa & Cole, Foscarini, Gancedo, Hotbath, Zieta.
Art: Galería Alzueta. Stan Van Steendam.
Wellness: Sauna y hammam.
Photography: Eugeni Pons.

Àbag Studio

Abel Pérez Gabucio (Barcelona, 1979) has developed his professional career from a position that bridges architecture and interior design, understood as a single design practice. Trained as a technical architect at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and with a placement at VIA University, his early career is linked to large-scale practices such as IDOM and, later, the Jordà & Guasch studio. In this context he developed a solid technical foundation and a precise understanding of the construction process, which he later brought to a more domestic scale and to closer, more direct relationships with clients.

In 2008 he founded Abag Studio in Barcelona, beginning an independent practice defined by attention to detail, material continuity and a clear commitment to building liveable spaces from everyday experience. The studio focuses its work on housing and residential interiors, approaching each commission as an opportunity to organise, simplify and bring coherence to existing spaces. View full biography.

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.

Today the studio brings together a team of six who work with solid oak, walnut, kambala and chestnut — certified, and selected for its behaviour, visual presence and durability. Each piece is made through techniques of manual execution: traditional cabinetmaking, Japanese joinery, Shou Sugi Ban charring. Processes that demand time and precision, and that produce results industrial manufacturing cannot replicate. Structure, surface, detail: everything responds to a logic intrinsic to the material, worked always with the grain and with the wood’s origin in mind.

Design through dialogue

Every commission begins with a conversation, around a table, with hand-drawn sketches and wood samples. Clients are invited to the workshop to see the raw material, to feel its textures, and to share in the construction of an idea. This proximity between those who make and those who commission defines the character of the studio: a domestic scale of craft practice that persists even when projects unfold across public or institutional spaces.

Junto’s portfolio spans private collectors to international architecture studios, hospitality brands and cultural institutions. Their pieces are present at the Fundação Champalimaud in Lisbon, on the Atlantic coast of Comporta, in projects by designers including Nicoline Beerkens and Alicia Murphy Design, and in spaces across the Netherlands, Italy and the United States. In 2025, the studio launched its first Signature Collection: a series of original designs that distil the workshop’s values, its understanding of process, and its commitment to material honesty.

Junto’s aesthetic is refined, functional and subtly expressive. They make pieces that hold against time, built to endure, in structure as much as in presence.

Faro Barcelona responds to that demand in 2026 with three collections designed by Xavier Carrasquet that share a common orientation: outdoor luminaires with decorative intent and technical rigour, capable of generating characterful atmospheres without compromising visual comfort or the nocturnal ecosystem. Toba, Nara and Saga are pieces that understand light as a compositional material — warm, directed, contained — and the exterior as a space that deserves the same care as any interior room.

Toba: the string light that became a luminaire

String lights belong to the imagination of domestic exteriors: small lights suspended between trees or above a terrace that turn the night into celebration without greater pretension. Xavier Carrasquet took that everyday typology and asked what would happen if it were given the same attention as an architectural luminaire. The result is Toba, designed for Faro Barcelona.

Toba is formed by silicone discs of 18 cm in diameter — a flexible, resilient material conceived for outdoor use — that filter light through their layers. An internal opal diffuser distributes the illumination homogeneously, generating a warm light free of glare. IP65 protection guarantees its use in demanding environmental conditions. The form, a succession of stepped planes that widen downward, gives it a discreet and recognisable sculptural presence.

The discs are available in beige, terracotta and brown, three tones drawn directly from Mediterranean landscapes. Their function goes beyond the structural: they act as chromatic filters that subtly tint the emitted light. When several pieces of different colours are combined in a single composition, they recreate the gradation of the Mediterranean sunset — from vivid orange to the warm white of dusk. Suspended at different heights or aligned in sequence, they trace a gentle rhythm across the nocturnal landscape that accompanies architecture and vegetation without competing with them.

Toba works both as an individual suspended luminaire and in garland-type compositions, allowing lines of light to be drawn between trees, pergolas or architectural elements with the same freedom of installation as the original typology, but with a qualitatively different light quality. As the designer himself notes, the aim was to preserve the simplicity and freedom of the string light while transforming it into an object capable of integrating naturally into the outdoor landscape. Toba fulfils that purpose with economy of means and formal precision.

Saga: a bell of light with commanding presence

There is a formal economy in Saga that sets it apart within Faro Barcelona’s outdoor catalogue. The piece, designed by Carrasquet, is built around a large-format metal bell — exterior in beige, black, orange or oxide brown, interior in white — whose scale gives it a presence that is both commanding and resolved. There is no superfluous ornament; the form says everything.

The shade serves a dual function. On the outside it defines the volume and protects against environmental conditions with IP65 rating; on the inside, the white finish maximises reflection and directs light downward with precision, while an opal diffuser conceals the source and softens the beam to prevent glare. The result is a warm, concentrated illumination suited to uses that demand functional light: outdoor tables, exterior bars, circulation areas.

Saga allows individual installation — with ceiling rose or hook — and multiple compositions at varying heights, linking units to draw garlands of greater presence. That flexibility of mounting extends its field of application from the domestic setting to restaurants and hospitality. The aluminium bell is here both decorative object and luminous instrument, without one condition compromising the other.

Nara: the outdoor light that cares for the night

EThe extended use of outdoor spaces — terraces, gardens and patios — has brought to the exterior the same demands for comfort and warmth that define good interior lighting. Nara, designed by Xavier Carrasquet for Faro Barcelona, responds to that demand with a proposal that adds a dimension less common in decorative outdoor products: respect for natural darkness.

The piece is built around a rounded shade, wrapped by a linear pattern that acts as a structural steel cage. That enveloping framework projects a play of light and shadow that animates the surroundings without generating glare, and reveals the inner form — a PEMD opal diffuser — that distributes light in a homogeneous and contained manner. The ensemble carries the presence of a considered domestic object, without the utilitarian traits that typically characterise outdoor products.

The environmental dimension of Nara goes beyond visual comfort. The control of light dispersion offered by the opal diffuser limits light pollution and protects the nocturnal biodiversity of the surroundings, turning a formal design decision into a gesture of responsibility toward the ecosystem. Sustainable outdoor lighting resides not only in energy consumption, but also in how and where light is emitted.

The collection is presented in three versions — portable with cable, suspension and floor — that resolve different needs within a coherent formal language. The finishes in beige, oxide brown and black offer a chromatic range broad enough to suit diverse aesthetics, from the most neutral and organic to the most contrasted and contemporary.

Narita reinterprets the essence of Nara in a more compact format

Its shade, with an enveloping linear pattern, filters light and creates a play of light and shadow that transforms terraces and gardens into welcoming spaces full of character. It is manufactured in stainless steel for greater outdoor resilience. It can be installed as an individual luminaire with ceiling rose, or form part of a garland system with several units.

Xavier Carrasquet

Xavier Fernández Carrasquet was born in Barcelona, where he studied at Elisava and trained as a product designer. His early career took place at Benedito Design, Ramon Benedito’s studio, where he developed pieces for a wide range of sectors and came to understand design as a process of collective construction. A desire to deepen his knowledge of manufacturing processes led him to join Luxiona, where he collaborated on projects by Jean Nouvel and Toni Arola, and where lighting became the central axis of his practice.

In 2006 he took over as head of the Design Department at Lamp. Over more than a decade he transformed a distribution-oriented catalogue into a technical portfolio aimed at specification: more than twenty-five product families launched, numerous national and international nominations and awards, and the integration of LED as a significant technological transition. Between 2017 and 2019 he directed the Barcelona Creative Lab, a studio opened in the city by the multinational XAL, from which products such as Unico and Roomor for Wever & Ducré were brought to market.

Since 2019 he has worked independently, collaborating with companies such as Vibia, Lamp and Faro Barcelona, and with professionals including Maria Güell (La Invisible). His approach to design is explicitly collaborative: bringing together complementary skills to enrich every stage of the creative process. He has taught at Elisava since 2013, where he also serves as a thesis tutor for Master’s students. For Carrasquet, teaching and designing follow the same logic: learning together, with curiosity and emotion, as an indispensable condition of creativity.