In this territory, within the municipality of Manacor and next to the small village of Son Macià, the studio Llorenç Brunet Arquitectes has designed a single-family home linked to a working farm. Es Rafal de Son Macià occupies a steeply sloping rural plot and covers 336 square metres across a ground floor and basement. The name already announces the project’s vocation. This is a country house bound to the land around it, rather than one “placed” on the landscape.

Four volumes on the slope

The first decision concerned the siting. The house sits on the highest and gentlest part of the plot and sinks partly into the topography. In this way it reduces its visual presence and adapts to the slope of the land. The programme is distributed across four interconnected volumes, slightly offset from one another to follow the contour lines. This fragmentation avoids the long block that a house of this size would have produced on an open hillside, and restores to the building the scale of the island’s rural groupings, formed by successive bodies added over time.

Each volume houses a distinct use and is covered by its own pitched roof of Arabic tiles. The slopes of unequal pitch draw asymmetrical gables crowned by stone chimneys, and from a distance the whole reads as a sequence of stepped pieces silhouetted against the pine wood. The rubble-stone walls, built with the stone characteristic of the Llevant, range in tone from ochre to pink and change colour with the time of day. At dusk, the raking light reveals the irregularity of each stone. The timber joinery and the Mallorcan louvred shutters, painted pale green, complete a recognisable image in which the island’s building tradition provides a precise and contemporary language.

The arrangement of the volumes orients the house in two directions: towards the sea, which appears on the horizon above the line of pines, and towards the inner landscape of the estate, with the nearby hills as a backdrop. An infinity-edge pool extends the main terrace towards the valley, and a garden of Mediterranean species, with plumbago, rosemary and bougainvillea, integrates the architecture with the vegetation of the hillside.

Patios of light and shade

Between the volumes lie the patios, the true heart of the project. Semi-sunken and sheltered by stone walls, they work as small refuges where light and shade alternate throughout the day and create different microclimates in every corner of the house. In one of them, a stretched net filters the midday sun and holds a cluster of woven-fibre lamps. In another, which serves as a dining room next to the kitchen, a bougainvillea climbs the wall and drops its flowers onto the gravel. The kitchen, the dining room and the bedrooms open onto these outdoor spaces through large sliding doors, and the relationship between inside and outside becomes part of everyday life.

The patios also sustain the climatic performance of the house. They bring natural light into every room and allow constant cross-ventilation, a strategy inherited from Mediterranean vernacular architecture. To this are added photovoltaic and solar thermal collectors that steer the house towards energy self-sufficiency. Sustainability is understood here as a way of building and of living, built into the project from the outset rather than added as a technical extra.

The interior, a serene backdrop

Inside, the palette is pared back to the essentials. White walls, painted beams that follow the pitch of the roofs, pale stone floors and wood in the joinery and furniture. The daytime rooms occupy the tallest volumes, where the sloping ceiling enlarges the space and light enters from several sides. The study is the house’s material exception. There the stone wall is left exposed inside, and a glazed corner frames the pine-covered hill that rises opposite the house.

Life at Es Rafal de Son Macià unfolds across this continuum of rooms, patios and terraces, following the path of the sun and the wind. The house proposes an unhurried pace, tied to the farm it belongs to and to a way of life in the countryside that has centuries of history in Mallorca. Those who live here occupy a place with memory, where each volume recalls the farmhouses that, over generations, have grown piece by piece on these same hillsides.

Architecture, topography, material and landscape come together in this project as a single proposal, which the studio itself sums up as the wish “to inhabit the place with respect and naturalness”. Es Rafal de Son Macià thus recovers the old meaning of its name. It is a house with its land around it, built with the stone of that same land.

Project: Es Rafal de Son Macià.
Programme: Detached single-family home linked to a working farm.
Location: Son Macià, Manacor (Mallorca).
Area: 336.20 m² (ground floor + basement).
Completed: 2025.
Architecture: Llorenç Brunet Arquitectes.
Lead architect: Llorenç Brunet Nicolau.
Contractor: Projectes i Obres JCA.
Photography: Neus Pastor.

Llorenç Brunet Arquitectes

Llorenç Brunet Nicolau (Manacor, 1971) graduated from the Vallès School of Architecture (ETSAV) in 1996 and has spent his entire career in Mallorca, working from his home town. At the head of Llorenç Brunet Arquitectes, the studio he founded and runs in Manacor, he has built a practice attentive to the island’s rural architecture, to rehabilitation and to energy efficiency, with a body of work increasingly focused on passive housing built to the Passivhaus standard.

His interest in heritage and bioclimatic architecture also has an institutional dimension. Since May 2007 he has been a board member of the Mallorca branch of the Official College of Architects of the Balearic Islands, in the areas of Heritage and Bioclimatics. Representing the college, he has served on Palma’s Historic Centre and Catalogue Commission, on the Heritage Committee of the Consell de Mallorca and on the revision of Inca’s general urban plan. He has also written some twenty articles on bioclimatic architecture and urban planning and given a number of lectures on building rehabilitation and models of the city.

The studio, which Brunet shares with partners Mateu Llodrà Adrover and Carme Pascual Estelrich, brings together expertise in architecture, design, restoration, urban planning, structures and project management, and works with a network of external collaborators in engineering, building services and quality control. Its record in public competitions includes first prizes for the restructuring of the Son Pardo racecourse in Palma, the social centre for older people in Manacor and the Guardia Civil barracks in Úbeda, as well as second prize for the extension of Manacor hospital. Several of its residential works were shortlisted in three consecutive editions of the Balearic Islands award for the best built work (2007–2010, 2011–2013 and 2014–2016). Recent projects include a series of interventions on rural land in Mallorca, among them Pleta de Son Violí, Lloseta and Es Rafal de Son Macià.

The city’s domestic architecture responds to the climate. Houses are built with thick limewashed adobe walls, which hold the warmth of the day, clay-tile roofs with deep wooden eaves that protect against the rain, and corridors around a central courtyard. Towards the street, the house presents a sober façade, often painted in intense colours, with balconies and wooden doors. Life unfolds inside, around the courtyard, among plants, light and shade. This logic of retreat has shaped the city for almost five centuries.

San Cristóbal is also a meeting place. The Tseltal and Tsotsil communities of nearby municipalities, such as Chamula and Zinacantán, fill its markets every day with produce from the land and with textiles woven on backstrap looms, whose embroidery and colours identify each community. This cultural richness has drawn travellers, anthropologists, writers and artists for decades. Some stayed for good. Declared a Pueblo Mágico in 2003, the city combines colonial memory, indigenous cultures and a contemporary life in which creative work has a place of its own.

Casa Amona belongs to this tradition of houses inhabited by art and craft. It was designed by Colar Colectivo de Arquitectura and completed in 2025 on an urban plot next to one of the city’s main green areas. The house works almost as a statement of the practice’s principles: read the place carefully, negotiate every decision with those who will live in it, and build with what the region knows how to do well.

Discreet towards the street, intense towards the interior

The house keeps a discreet relationship with the street and unfolds its life towards the interior. There, carefully placed courtyards and openings create views in two directions: towards the landscape around the plot and between the rooms themselves. From the garden, the house reads as a sequence of white volumes of bold proportions, pierced by wooden windows with lattice screens. A blind wall rises above the roof as a crowning element, measuring the house against the sky. Beside it, a terrace with a timber structure and clay-tile roof looks out towards the hill.

The 155 square metres of built area are distributed over two levels, conceived as functionally independent units. The ground floor brings together the living room, dining room and kitchen in a continuous space, along with a full bathroom. A limewashed half-height wall, topped with a wooden rail, separates the areas without closing them off, and a cypress post marks the passage from one to the other. The layout allows the living room to become the main bedroom without major works. The house thus anticipates different conditions of use over time, a foresight that makes full sense in a home designed for several generations.

The first floor holds the private spaces: bedroom, study and terrace, all directly connected to the views of the hill. The study opens onto the terrace through a large opening that blurs the line between inside and outside. Cypress shelves run along the walls and step down to become a bench and a sideboard, and a desk sits in front of a window framed by the treetops.

A studio for artistic work

The project is completed by an independent 45-square-metre studio, devoted to artistic work and family gatherings. It also has its own bedroom and bathroom, which makes it self-sufficient. Its main space is a covered gallery, supported by an exposed brick pillar and a structure of timber beams, where a long cantilevered worktable runs along the wall. In front of it, brick steps rise towards the courtyard.

That courtyard is organised around an ash tree that already stood on the site. Preserving it was the starting point of the composition. Local vegetation and a small pond complete an urban microhabitat integrated into the whole, sheltered by tall earth-toned walls on which the tree casts its shadow throughout the day. The studio thus sits between two worlds: the retreat of creative work and the shared life of the courtyard, open to the family and to those who visit.

Masonry, exposed brick, adobe and cypress wood

The materials sustain this continuity. The project combines masonry, exposed brick, non-structural adobe and cypress wood. Wood plays an essential role: it forms the roofs, the joinery and all the built-in furniture, from the kitchen units to the bookshelves, the wardrobes and the bedroom headboard. The limewash, the wood and the clay-tile floors run from inside to outside without interruption, so that gallery, kitchen and terrace share the same skin. These are materials from the region, worked by local trades, and their choice reflects the practice’s ethical conviction of building an architecture that ages with dignity, that accepts patina and use, and that gains character over the years.

A house named after a grandmother

Amona means grandmother in Basque. The name arises from a personal circumstance and gives meaning to the whole project, designed so that everyday family life and artistic creation can coexist. Few words better describe a house conceived for the long term, one that makes room for those who arrive and those who remain.

The lead architect, Santiago Constantino De Angoitia, was also the builder. This double responsibility can be seen in the details, such as the precise meeting of wood and lime, the joints of the brickwork and the proportion of each opening. The project was resolved on site as much as in the office, with the same attention to place that Colar champions in every project.

In the end, Casa Amona recovers what San Cristóbal has taught for centuries: a house that is discreet towards the street and saves its intensity for the interior. At its heart, instead of a colonial fountain, there is an ash tree, and beneath it a studio where people work with their hands. When the mist comes down from the hill and slips between the walls, the house is still there, limewashed and warm, ready to grow old alongside those who live in it.

Project: Casa Amona.
Location: San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.
Programme: single-family house with studio.
Built area: 155 m².
Completed: 2025.
Architecture: Colar Colectivo de Arquitectura.
Lead architect: Santiago Constantino De Angoitia.
Team: Santiago Constantino De Angoitia, Maximiliano Animas Rueda, Mateo Torres Sánchez, Roberto Marroquín Polín.
Structural engineering: Virgilio Domínguez.
Landscape: Terruño Paisaje.
Construction: Santiago Constantino De Angoitia.
Photography: Ariadna Polo.
Source: Colar Colectivo de Arquitectura.

Colar. Colectivo de arquitectura

Colar Colectivo de Arquitectura was founded in Mexico City in 2021 by Santiago Constantino, Maximiliano Animas, Mateo Torres and Roberto Marroquín. All four trained at the Faculty of Architecture of UNAM and chose to make collaboration more than a working method: a way of understanding the discipline. Paulina Animas joined in 2025. Before founding the collective, its members completed their education with academic stays in Rosario, Madrid, Seville and Berlin. They also worked at practices such as Ignacio Urquiza Arquitectos, Rzero, Dos Puntos Arquitectura, HUBER, TLR-AU, Escobedo Soliz, Talleresque and the studio of Nicolás Campodónico, on housing, urban and landscape projects across a wide range of scales.

From that shared trajectory emerges an unusual structure. It is a distributed studio, able to operate across several territories at once and to draw on what the collective itself calls “situated knowledge”. Decisions are made horizontally, through ongoing dialogue between the team, the clients and those who will inhabit the spaces. Its members acknowledge that this process generates a certain friction, and they embrace it as part of the craft: each project is refined through that negotiation until it reaches a more rigorous response, more attentive to place. In the face of the economic, political and socio-environmental constraints of contemporary practice, design is approached as a synthesis of spatial strategy, material system and context.

Their built work is spread mainly across Mexico City, Chiapas, Hidalgo, Morelos and the State of Mexico. It spans housing, from private commissions to experimental domestic typologies, as well as renovation and restoration, ephemeral architecture, landscape, hospitality and furniture design. Among their most notable projects are Morada de Piedra (2024), in Malinalco; Casa Amona (2025) and Casa Estelí (2026), in San Cristóbal de las Casas; and the Pabellón Cempasúchil (2025) and the recent Casa Caliza (2026), both in Tulancingo. Their work has been published in outlets such as Dezeen, Dwell, Architectural Digest, Arquine, Metalocus and ArchDaily.

Nečín is a territory of second lives. The smooth rock walls preserve the trace of labour, but their use has changed completely, and what was once extraction is now landscape and meeting place. This logic of slow transformation, in which each stage is layered over the previous one and leaves it visible, also runs through the small house that the Prague studio Facha architekti has renovated and extended on the edge of the village.

A house that grows in layers

The history of the building is one of almost organic growth. Originally, the plot contained a single-storey stable, on top of which someone later built a simple weekend cabin. Over the years, that cabin was gradually adapted until it became a permanent home, and each change left its mark on walls and ceilings. Its current owners, a family of four, friends of the studio, needed more living space, a real relationship with the garden and somewhere to keep the objects of domestic life that were already overflowing the house.

The architects took that process of growth as their starting point. The house sits on the edge of the village, among detached houses and scattered former agricultural buildings, and the extension was designed as one more layer in its development, clearly distinct in form and material, which allows the history of the building to remain legible.

The new volume is attached to the whitewashed façade like a body at once foreign and familiar. Two prisms of different heights, joined by an inclined plane that evokes the slope of a roof, clad in corrugated sheet metal of an intense red. The taller one lifts off the ground on slender supports and seems suspended above the garden. Corrugated sheet metal was chosen as a simple, durable and affordable material, which the team itself could install and which gives the intervention an unmistakably contemporary identity.

To the west, a large sliding window opens the living room onto a larch terrace with generous steps that serve as seating, shaded by a textile awning in the same red. The lower volume houses the new main entrance, and this relocation of the access made it possible to reorganise the original layout, enlarge the bathroom and redesign the kitchen. The built-in cupboards in the extension finally resolve the need for storage.

The intervention reaches the whole house

The basement and attic remain almost untouched, while the raised ground floor is completely reconfigured. The original building received thermal insulation, new timber windows, a corrugated metal roof whose silver grey enters into dialogue with the red of the extension, and an air-source heat pump. Inside, pine plywood shapes the custom-made furniture, dark natural linoleum unifies the floors, a rotating wood-burning stove occupies a corner next to the kitchen and the bathroom is finished in cement plaster.

Within the extension, pine plywood lines the walls and ceiling, and its pronounced grain continues across built-in benches, cupboards and a small round table. It is a warm, enveloping space, open to the garden, that extends the dining room through a wide opening in the original wall. In the kitchen, the red worktop brings the colour of the façade indoors.

Architecture is offered here as a support for a family’s everyday life, attentive to its gestures rather than to its own image, as the photographs show: an inhabited house, with books and records, paintings on the walls, plants on every windowsill, bentwood chairs in red and black around the table, and a dog keeping watch over the garden from the entrance.

Design and build

The most singular aspect of the project lies in the way it was made. As in other works by the studio, Facha architekti designed the extension and built it together with its owners, from the timber structure to the façade and the interior linings. The images of the construction tell it better than any project description. The framework of studs raised on a summer evening, the yellow battens over the waterproof membrane, the first red profiles framing openings and corners, the architects on the scaffolding fixing the sheet metal in the depths of winter.

For the studio, this direct involvement is an inseparable part of its practice. In small, unconventional projects, it allows them to resolve details and construction solutions for which it is difficult to find contractors, and it gives them a knowledge of materials, techniques and craft that feeds every new commission. The architects explain it clearly: being physically involved in the building process “creates opportunities to refine the design through countless details and decisions that simply cannot be anticipated in front of a computer”.

Years ago, Martin Chlanda spoke of architecture as “social sculpture”, a practice that works as much on form as on the relationships between those who make it possible. In Nečín, both ideas meet. A house extended among friends, in which architects and owners shared tools, cold and decisions.

Perhaps it is the right place for it. In a village whose memory belongs to the stonecutters, who knew stone intimately because they worked it, this small group of young architects champions a similar knowledge, learned through direct contact with material. And like those quarries that keep the marks of labour while water turns them into something else, the house preserves the traces of the stable, the cabin and the successive repairs, and now adds a red layer that, in all likelihood, will not be the last either.

Project: House With a Red Addition
Location: Nečín, Příbram district (Czech Republic)
Architecture: Facha architekti — Martin Chlanda, Andrea Sobotková, Matěj Nepustil, Jana Fischerová, Nikola Gronychová.
Completed: 2025.
Built-up area: 50 m² (house) + 26 m² (extension).
Gross floor area: 154 m² (house) + 26 m² (extension).
Plot: 515 m².
Photography: Peter Fabo.
Collaborators and suppliers:
Timber structure of the extension and finishing work: Facha architekti. Masonry: Jaroslav Kozohorsky.
Windows: Cadre.
Joinery: Panab, Eman Trefný.
Upholstery: Polstrin, A-ACTU.
Lighting: Artemide.
Chairs and table: Ton.
Linoleum: DLW Colorette, by Gerflor.

Facha architekti

Facha architekti is an architecture studio founded in Prague in 2018 by Jana Fischerová, Martin Chlanda and Matěj Nepustil, joined in 2020 by the artist and designer Andrea Sobotková, completing the current team. They work from a studio in an inner courtyard in the Smíchov district, and the name already announces a way of understanding the craft, in colloquial Czech, facha is work, toil. The founders met at the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University (ČVUT), and part of their roots lies in the Povětroň studio, where they began to share a common outlook on Czech rural architecture and the search for its character.

Each arrived by a path of their own. Martin trained at a school of arts and crafts in Český Krumlov specialising in the restoration of historic buildings. He later spent three years in the interdisciplinary studio of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, an experience that dismantled the prejudices of his earlier training and brought him closer to the contemporary art of Gordon Matta-Clark, Pierre Huyghe or Francis Alÿs. Matěj grew up observing the evolution of contemporary architecture through his father, also an architect, while Jana, the daughter of an architect, sat the faculty’s entrance exams almost as a trial run that ended up becoming a vocation. Andrea’s arrival strengthened an inclination present from the outset, the dialogue with art, which the studio also cultivates in installations for public space made with artist friends.

Their references combine the precision of Peter Zumthor and the Swiss and Austrian tradition with the deliberate rawness of Arno Brandlhuber or Jan De Vylder, but their closest source lies in their own territory. The vernacular architecture and anonymous self-building of Czech villages, they consider a heritage as fertile as the international magazines that fill their shelves. Hence their interest in transforming what already exists, from historic buildings to ordinary houses from the second half of the 20th century.

The small scale is a conscious choice. Single-family homes and seasonal retreats offer them creative freedom and, above all, a close and lasting relationship with those who will inhabit them. Within the team, sensibilities complement one another: Martin and Jana have the ability to imprint the character of its owners on each house, while Matěj leans towards more general solutions, attentive above all to the surroundings. Martin sums up this ethic in the idea that a well-designed house is an imprint of the person who lives in it, and he borrows from Joseph Beuys the notion of “social sculpture”: beyond the built form, each work should cultivate relationships with the client and with those who work on it, and end in friendship.

The building site is the studio’s other natural habitat. Its members alternate between the computer and construction, convinced that combining intellectual and physical work is a healthy way of thinking about architecture, and that contact with the landscape and with people outside their own circle enriches the project. That early aspiration to carry out at least one work a year with their own hands has become an established part of their practice, especially in small projects whose unconventional details are difficult to entrust to others. Works such as the house in Kořenov, between the Jizera Mountains and the Krkonoše, or The Box in the Barn, a seasonal retreat inserted into a barn in eastern Bohemia, have brought them international exposure, and the renovation of an apartment next to Prague’s Old Town Square was nominated in 2025 for the Czech Grand Design awards. With an eye also on public space, small urban ensembles and models of collective housing such as Baugruppen, Facha architekti holds that the generosity of a building is independent of its size, that intuition and passion often weigh more than exact parameters, and that in every building form, structure and material coexist with the people and stories that sustain it.

This anonymous architecture follows a logic of survival and careful use of resources. Each terrace responds to the fall of the land, each wall makes use of the stone the field itself provided, each chozo is oriented and closed according to the sun and the wind. That original sustainable design, refined over generations, is a landscape built with economy and patience, and any house that wishes to settle there must first learn to read it.

A few months ago we told the story of how Ábaton renovated a former sheep stable in the Sierra de Gata. There, memory was still standing, in the stone walls and the roof tiles the studio chose to respect. In La Vera the starting point is different: a plot of terraced olive trees and rural land regulations that impose a traditional aesthetic. Ábaton took that condition as design material. Curved clay tiles, local stone walls and pitched roofs place the house within the family of local buildings, the chozos of the olive grove. The plan, the views and the services, on the other hand, belong entirely to our time. The constraint ended up being the reason the house conveys a feeling that is so hard to achieve in a new building: that of having been there longer than it actually has.

A house that steps down like the terrain

The plot descends in terraces and the house follows it. Rather than starting from a single platform, the project is organised in small changes of level that follow the terraces of the olive grove and, at the same time, gently separate one space from another. The gesture is as much about respect for the land as it is a domestic strategy.

The house was commissioned by a couple whose children had already left home. They wanted a house made to measure, designed for two, that could grow when their children arrived with their own families. Ábaton resolved this dual scale in section. The different levels and semi-independent spaces allow the house to function in a contracted form when its owners are living there alone, and to open up entirely on days when the family gathers, without surplus square metres in everyday life. The same separation that organises uses also organises the climate, since only the areas in use at any given time need to be heated or cooled. What translates into savings in the low season becomes an open house during the holidays.

A house that looks west

The views lie to the west, over the valley, and the studio decided they should prevail over the most comfortable solar orientation. Sightlines cross the house from side to side, so that from almost any corner the eye reaches the far end of the valley and the line of the mountains. That choice comes at a price, the harsh afternoon sun, and the project meets it with two responses. The first are the chestnut shutters which, closed or ajar, give the west façade its rhythm of vertical boards and filter the western light. The second are the eaves, which cast shade over the openings. To the south stretch the porches, beneath timber beams and a steel structure, with the brick floor continuing from the interior.

The whole house works almost like one of those porches. Open from one side to the other, it lets the westerly winds pass through and cool it on summer afternoons, while the thick walls do their silent work, slowly storing heat and cold and keeping the interior temperature stable with no added energy consumption. Being on rural land, the house also needs to be self-sufficient. Solar panels, aerothermal heating, a gas tank, its own well and a septic tank make it practically independent of urban networks. Here, autonomy is part of the project’s ethics and, more than that, of the very possibility of building in that place.

The social space, a place of retreat

At the heart of the house, set at a slightly lower level, lies the shared space: living room, dining room and kitchen in a single continuous room. Stepping down into it produces a sense of retreat, as if the house were closing around whoever arrives, and yet it is the spot with the best views, extending out towards two terraces and the pool. A masonry fireplace with a granite mantelpiece anchors the living area, facing an exposed stone wall that is a constant reminder of what the house is made of. Timber beams run along the sloping ceiling and reclaimed brick covers the floor throughout. The kitchen, with pale fronts and stone worktops, opens to the landscape through an elongated window that frames the mountains at the height of the hob. The furniture keeps to the same tone: linen sofas, wood and rush armchairs, a coffee table made from a granite slab on tree trunks, and Oscar Tusquets’ famous Potro chairs, recovered in several colours that add a rustic, cheerful note around the dining table.

The main bedroom has its own porch, with direct access to the garden, and linen curtains that filter the afternoon light while the shadow of the pergola draws stripes across the floor. The other bedrooms look onto a porch-corridor that runs along the north façade and acts as a filter between the interior and the countryside. It is one of the most beautiful routes through the house, with reclaimed wooden doors and light coming in from the side. Here and there the house allows itself small spaces of retreat, such as the long desk beneath two windows that look out over the olive grove and the stone wall, next to an old panelled door that slides on a rail. The bathrooms, finished in earth-toned microcement and each different from the others, break with classic coldness, bringing an organic warmth with their velvety, natural texture.

Materials drawn from the surroundings

The palette of materials is short and comes from the surroundings. Local stone in the walls, reclaimed clay and brick, chestnut for the shutters, exposed timber in the roofs, perlite in the interior finishes, microcement in the bathrooms. These are materials that will age with dignity, and some arrived on site with time already built into them. The project also preserved all the existing trees; the house settles among the olive trees without displacing them. The pool completes the sequence. Raised above the ground like an alberca, a traditional irrigation tank, it is closer to the tradition of watering the land than to that of leisure, and it extends the living level towards the valley, closing the succession of porches and terraces.

Anyone walking through the olive grove today sees a house of stone and tile that looks like one more among the chozos and terrace walls. That discretion is its greatest achievement. In La Vera, where for centuries people learned to inhabit the slope step by step, Ábaton has built a house that understands that lesson and carries it into the present with ease.

Project: Country house in the olive grove.
Location: La Vera, Cáceres.
Architecture and landscaping: Ábaton.
Lead architects: Guillermo Santos, Blanca Marías and Javier de
Montero.
Photography: Azul Vivó.
Source: Ábaton. Paula Cárdenas.

Ábaton

Since its foundation in 1998, Ábaton has established itself as one of Spain’s most influential architecture studios. Its work, renowned for its formal honesty and conceptual depth, is guided by a clear philosophy: to eliminate the superfluous in order to reach the essential. For Ábaton, architecture is not only a matter of space, but a form of intimate conversation —with oneself, with others, and with nature.

In a world saturated with stimuli, Ábaton reclaims the power of architectural silence. Its projects reflect an aesthetic that transcends reason to focus on the vital experience of those who inhabit them. They design spaces that embrace and converse with their surroundings.

Committed to sustainability from the beginning, Ábaton was among the first studios in Spain to use CLT timber, and has built more houses with this system than any other practice in the country. They use recyclable materials, plan with bioclimatic criteria, and minimize the environmental footprint of each project. Their architecture respects both place and time: homes that aspire to be timeless, lasting and conscious.

In addition to new builds, Ábaton has carried out more than 300 refurbishments, understanding that to restore is also to create. Their comprehensive approach —encompassing design, construction and execution— ensures coherence, precision and beauty at every stage of the process.

Today, with more than 500 completed projects, Ábaton continues to create new ways of living —freer, more empathetic, more human. In their spaces, one breathes an architecture meant more to be felt than to be seen.

Architect Camino Alonso is the creative director of Ábaton Arquitectura, a studio she founded in 1998 together with Ignacio Lechón, also an architect, and Carlos Alonso, an industrial engineer. A new generation has joined Ábaton’s management team: Miriam Arias, director of Interior Design, and Blanca Marías, architect and director.

The paths leading out of the village cross dry-farmed fields, carob and olive trees held in place by stone terrace walls. It is a landscape built with whatever was at hand, in which every wall explains its origin and its function. That same logic, that of an architecture that shows what it is made of, runs through Casa Arlo, the single-family house designed by architects Luis Royon Barea and Andreu Arévalo Llàcer in one of Creixell’s residential areas.

A prism on the slope

The house, with 310 square metres of built area, presents itself as a prism of sharp edges and clean geometry that settles carefully onto the terrain. The level of the ground floor coincides with the centre of gravity of the plot, a decision that keeps alterations to the natural profile to a minimum. The setbacks set by planning regulations define the building’s footprint, and the result is a white monolith that captures the shifts of Mediterranean light throughout the day.

Large openings with natural timber frames punctuate this smooth façade, introducing a warm counterpoint and connecting the interior with its surroundings. As evening falls and the house is lit from within, these openings become the most eloquent feature of the volume.

The meeting with the ground is resolved through an exposed concrete plinth that absorbs the change in level. Above it, the free strip surrounding the house is given over to outdoor use. In the corner opposite the entrance, where the geometry of the plot offers more room and better sun exposure, a timber deck holds a swimming pool of simple lines. Beside it, a light pergola covered with reed matting filters the sun and casts a shifting pattern of shadows onto the glazing, in the manner of the traditional vine arbours of the coast. Even the stair that climbs the garden terraces is built with the same ceramic blocks used inside, laid so that their perforations remain visible on every tread.

Structure as finish

The character of the work springs from a constructive decision that the architects have sought to express throughout the project: each material is shown as it is and fulfils a recognisable function. The above-ground structure is resolved almost entirely with precast concrete elements, a modular system that brings metric order, economy of means and an aesthetic of industrial roots. This dry assembly coexists with the basement, where the retaining walls are built in cast-in-place reinforced concrete. The basement resists the thrust of the ground and also works as a technical podium, housing the parking and the building services.

Inside, the palette is reduced to three materials. The vertical enclosures leave the Termoarcilla thermal clay block exposed, its ribbed texture providing a constant geometric vibration, a terracotta tone that brings warmth to the spaces and considerable thermal inertia. Against this rough surface, concrete appears raw in columns and slabs, bearing the marks of the formwork and the weight of its presence. The continuous timber floor completes the ensemble and restores the domestic scale. The architects speak of a “warm brutalism”, and the expression describes precisely an atmosphere in which material austerity produces, paradoxically, a sense of welcome.

The services run exposed, their white conduits travelling across walls and ceilings, and the pine furniture, the bookcases full of books and the rattan lamps extend that same honesty to the scale of the object.

The void that orders the house

The entrance has been shifted towards the west façade, where the difference in level with the street is smaller and the arrival can happen gently. A contained hallway, separated from the workspace by a lattice of timber slats, prepares the passage into the day area, which opens all at once as a large continuous platform. The kitchen, resolved with smooth white fronts and wood-finish worktops, is organised around an island that faces the rest of the floor and encourages shared life along the longitudinal axis of the house.

The true spatial engine appears beside the central vertical circulation core: a double-height space that holds the living room and the library and links the two main floors. This void expands the perception of space and also acts as a thermal and light regulator, as the upper windows carry daylight to the far end of the ground floor. Here the architecture responds to precise passive criteria. Facing openings allow cross ventilation, and the orientation ensures that winter sun enters the main living room directly between ten and twelve, solar time, around the solstice.

The concrete stair connecting the floors is lightened by its enclosure, a white net-like metal mesh that protects without interrupting the passage of light. Seen from the living room, the stair seems suspended within a translucent veil.

Inhabiting the gallery

On the upper floor, the corridor works as a gallery that looks over the living room through large timber-framed glazed panels. From here the double height can be taken in at a glance, so that the private area, with two bedrooms and a small outdoor balcony, shares in the generosity of the common space. Light and views cross the house from end to end, and the daily life of the ground floor remains present upstairs as well.

The bedrooms keep the serene tone of the whole. In the main bedroom, a canopy bed draped in light fabric, a double washbasin on a bamboo countertop with round mirrors suspended from timber posts, and a shower clad in concrete pieces compose an open and fluid space. In the children’s room, the ceramic block is painted white and retains its texture, while a low timber bed, low-height shelves and a swing hung from the slab turn the structure into a support for play. It is in these details that the house reveals its most valuable quality: an architecture designed to accompany a family life that grows, changes and occupies space in its own way.

A house made of the essential

Casa Arlo shows that material restraint can be a form of generosity. With a reduced palette and everyday construction elements, the project achieves an expressiveness that stems from proportion, from structural order and from the care with which each piece is allowed to show itself. The tension between the precast system and the singular experience of inhabiting gives the house its particular calm. Like the stone terrace walls that order the fields of Creixell, the house explains itself through its construction, and in that clarity it finds its beauty.

Project: Casa Arlo
Location: Creixell (Tarragona).
Built area: 310 m².
Completed: 2025.
Architecture: Luis Royon Barea and Andreu Arévalo Llàcer.
Photography: Lluís Bort i Cerezo.
Source: Lluís Bort.

Luis Royon Barea

Luis Royon Barea qualified as an architect at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Reus (Universitat Rovira i Virgili) in 2017, and a year later founded his own studio in Tarragona, LRB_arquitectura. Since then he has taken on commissions of varied scale and nature across residential, commercial and rehabilitation work, guiding each project through every stage: from concept and design to site management and technical coordination.

Alongside this, since 2021 he has worked as a valuation architect for officially approved appraisal companies, among them Gloval, a role that has led him to handle more than five hundred cases a year. This constant contact with real homes, with their recurring problems and with the people who live in them, has refined a way of working grounded in anticipation and direct dealing. Royon sees architecture as a close, personal service, sustained by clear explanations and by the conviction that every client should understand, step by step, the decisions that shape their home.

Andreu Arévalo Llacer

Andreu Arévalo Llàcer trained at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Reus (Universitat Rovira i Virgili), where he graduated in 2013 with highest honours (Matrícula de Honor). His student years were shaped by collective and experimental work: he took part in teams such as Solar Decathlon and Build Our Nation, in workshops including “La ciutat Mediterrània” and one held at EMBT, and was a member of the BON group at the 2012 Venice Biennale.

After early steps in urban planning and rehabilitation, he steered his career towards conceptual design and architectural visualisation, first as an independent professional and as a partner at Arquitectura Beta, and later with Beta Imagery, the studio he founded in 2017 and has led ever since. He works with architecture practices and builders on the conceptualisation and definition of landscape, interior and residential projects.

His approach to design rests on a firm conviction: the concept is the soul of the work, and the challenge lies in keeping it intact as the technical complexity of its construction grows. Arévalo seeks a dialogue in which the idea and its constraints nourish one another, giving rise to spaces that reconcile character and pragmatism, depth and lightness.

“The commission came about because of a chair”, recalls Maria Just. The client came to her studio in Vilafranca interested in a model by the firm Vergés, and from that conversation about an object grew, over time, a broader trust that led to this project: renovating the house where he had grown up, to live in it now with his wife and young children. Casa MC is, therefore, a project of continuity, a home passing from one generation to the next that had to do so while preserving its character and identity.

Recovered wood

From the outset, designer and client shared the idea of a contemporary, warm and timeless house, in which the existing architecture would be complemented by a careful selection of materials and furniture. Wood became the central argument, and the first gesture was to recover what was already there. The original doors, frames and joinery were stripped, some on site and others in the workshop, until the patina of stain and varnish that had darkened them over the years was removed. Beneath those layers emerged a light-toned, luminous wood that now visually links the rooms and holds, in every frame, the memory of the family home.

On this recovered base, the new elements unfold. All the bespoke furniture and the kitchen, designed by Maria Just, were made in natural oak by Fusteria Ramon Cornellà, a workshop in Moja, just a few kilometres from the studio. Storage walls, benches, steps and the kitchen bar, clad in vertical slats that follow its curved end, extend the same material, so that wood ceases to be a finish and becomes the very structure of the domestic narrative. For the flooring, after much debate, a porcelain stoneware by Marazzi was chosen that reproduces oak with remarkable fidelity. A practical decision, designed for life with young children, that keeps the chromatic continuity of the whole intact.

The patio, heart of the house

The day area is organised around the different levels of the original house. Solid oak steps resolve the changes in height between the entrance hall, living room and dining room, creating distinct atmospheres that share light and views. The house thus reads as a continuous sequence, in which each space can be sensed from the one before.

At the heart of the floor plan, an interior patio receives overhead light through a skylight. Its planter, finished with sand-toned ceramic pieces, gathers indoor plants on a bed of white pebbles and acts as the green lung of the entire home. Beside it rises the original staircase, which regains its prominence as one of the most recognisable architectural elements of the house, with wooden handrails and trims that connect it to the rest of the interior. At its foot, a built-in bench and the TMM floor lamp by Miguel Milá for Santa & Cole form a reading corner that reveals one of the designer’s affinities: the Catalan modernity of Milá and Coderch, and their way of understanding design as simplicity in the service of life.

Around the fire

The fireplace occupies a prominent place in the project. Built into the wall and accompanied by a horizontal piece in Dekton Adia by Cosentino, which serves as a ledge, it becomes the centre around which the entire day area unfolds, together with the kitchen and dining room. The ceilings, traced by curved lines, soften the boundaries between spaces and accompany the movement of light.

The kitchen combines oak units with glazed display cabinets and smooth stone-toned fronts, with worktop and splashback in the same Adia porcelain surface. In the dining room, the Leiho table by Treku gathers around it the Bogart chairs by Manel Molina for Vergés, with rush seats, which are repeated as stools at the bar. The object that gave rise to the commission thus takes its place where the family gathers.

The furniture follows the same restraint: Bali sofas by Grupo Tessuto in oat-coloured linen, wooden armchairs with light upholstery, the Greta lamp by Gabriel Teixidó for Carpyen and a lithograph by Eduardo Chillida that converses serenely with the architecture. Decorative objects appear sparingly, letting the house breathe. In the study, a large storage wall and a sturdy natural oak desk maintain the order that a family with young children needs.

Abundant natural light filters through wooden slatted blinds that regulate sunlight and privacy. Beyond their function, they draw shifting patterns of light across floors and walls throughout the day and enhance the warmth of the interior, as if the house itself were marking the passing of the hours.

A house that endures

Casa MC speaks of what endures. Of a home that returns to the family who lived in it, of a wood that recovers its colour once what time had added is removed, and of a craft, that of local carpentry, that gives shape to every bespoke piece. In a territory that lives to the rhythm of the grape harvest, Maria Just has worked the way the land is worked in the Penedès: removing what is superfluous, caring for what remains and trusting time to do the rest.

Project: Casa MC.
Location: Les Cabanyes, Alt Penedès (Barcelona).
Completed: 2026.
Interior design: Maria Just Interiorisme.
Technical architecture: Josep Maria Ferrando.
Photography: Meritxell Arjalaguer.
Joinery and bespoke furniture: Fusteria Ramon Cornellà.
Aluminium windows and enclosures: Vialta.
Construction / Masonry / Flooring: Jaume Balcells.
Electrical, lighting and climate control: Carles Vallès.
Painting: Toni Ramos.
Flooring and wall finishes: FECA, Marazzi.
Kitchen: diseño de Maria Just en roble natural; encimera y frontales en Dekton Adia de Cosentino.
Furniture: Entrance hall. TMM floor lamp by Miguel Milá for Santa & Cole. Living room. Bali sofas in oat-coloured linen by Grupo Tessuto. Greta table lamp by Gabriel Teixidó for Carpyen. Lithograph by Eduardo Chillida. Dining room and kitchen. Leiho table by Treku. Bogart rush chairs and stools by Manel Molina for Vergés.

Maria Just

Although her initial academic path was in Political Science, Maria Just soon discovered her true calling in interior design. After studying at Elisava, she began her professional career in 2005 at Raimon Parera’s studio, which specialized in projects for the fashion, hospitality, and residential sectors. It was there that she found her affinity for domestic spaces—an interest that dated back to childhood, when she spent hours rearranging furniture and devouring her mother’s interior design magazines: Ambiente, Nuevo Estilo…

Today, she leads her own studio, Maria Just Interiorisme, in Vilafranca del Penedès, where she develops warm, timeless, and deeply personal projects. Her style is defined by a blend of minimalism and warmth, with special attention to natural materials and the architectural context.

Maria steers clear of fleeting trends and excess. She draws inspiration from Catalan modernist architecture, from figures such as Coderch and Milá, and from international designers like Marcio Kogan and John Pawson. She believes that in recent years, our homes have become the epicenters of our lives, and that design should foster comfort, connection, and openness.

For her, each project is a new beginning. A gift she approaches with respect, enthusiasm, and the same passion for design that first led her down this path. “Ten years from now,” she says, “I see myself enjoying my work just as much as I do today—with the same excitement I felt when I started.”

In a place like this, the architect’s first question is: what kind of architecture is appropriate for inhabiting it. Vila Marebo, designed by architect Frederico Zanelato, answers through the organisation of space. The commission came from a long-standing collaborator and was to include two independent blocks joined by a walkway and a generous glazed gallery. Starting from this, the studio conceived the house as a miniature village occupying the entire plot, where the routes between volumes and the in-between spaces carry as much weight as the rooms themselves.

Two volumes and a gallery

The design rests on two conditions that are a necessity in southern Bahia: orientation to the sun and the use of the wind. Splitting the house into two bodies allows the breeze to pass through the whole, and strategically placed openings ensure cross-ventilation inside. The result is a porous architecture, in which the boundary between inside and outside dissolves and the tropical climate becomes part of the project as one more material.

The two volumes read clearly from the street. They are white, limewashed bodies, crowned by ceramic tile roofs that slope in opposite directions and rest on turned timber posts whose ends protrude beneath the eaves, a direct reference to the traditional house of the Bahian coast. Between them, set back, the glazed gallery is wrapped in a curtain of vertically arranged biriba rods. The rods keep their natural, slightly irregular shape, and form a veil that protects the interior without closing it off. By day it filters the sun and the gaze; at dusk, with the lights on, the façade becomes a lantern reflected on the pool and the sand street.

The house is entered through a pivoting timber door, flanked by louvred panels, which leads into the living area, a double-height space covered by a gallery with a timber structure and glass enclosures. Beneath the gallery’s transparent roof, a ceiling of thin timber rods acts as a lattice, letting light through in bands that fall across the floor. This roof guides the eye and the step towards the living area, and turns the entrance into a gradual passage towards the outside. On the upper floor, a walkway crosses the double-height void to join the two blocks; its railings of timber trunks and braided rope, together with the fibre lamps hanging over the space, extend the same material logic of the whole.

The house changes character towards the garden

Towards the garden, the house changes character and opens up completely. The ground floor extends into porches supported by timber trunks, and a broad deck connects the rooms with the swimming pool, which folds into an L beside it. The upper-floor terraces, with rustic timber railings, act as a roof for the spaces below. Beneath one of them is the outdoor kitchen, with a masonry counter and a long shelf lined with clay pieces; beneath the central gallery, a large dining area gathers around a round table, presided over by a lamp of plant fibre. The indoor kitchen opens onto the deck through large folding glass panels, so that on hot days the boundary between inside and outside disappears.

On the ground floor, a suite has a bathroom whose shower opens, through a pane of glass, onto a small private garden enclosed by a palisade of timber trunks, so that water, vegetation and sky become part of the same space. On the upper floor, two further suites have their own terraces, opening between palm trees towards the neighbouring rooftops. In the bedrooms, the mosquito nets suspended over the beds, the light fabrics and the clay pieces carry the same restraint as the exterior.

The choice of materials reflects a desire to belong

The white lime of the walls, the warmth of the timber, the glass and the natural fibres, present in the rope of the railings and the weave of the lamps, make up a palette recognisable in the vernacular architecture of the region, reinterpreted in a contemporary language. The leading role falls to biriba, a wood from the Atlantic Forest that is worked into thin rods and used to form ceilings and enclosures. Its function is twofold: it filters natural light, protecting the interiors from excess radiation, and it casts shifting shadows that move across floors and walls as the day advances. The house thus becomes a habitable sundial, and the material justifies its presence on climatic and sensory grounds. The same material extends to the boundaries of the plot, resolved with palisades of timber trunks, and its presence ends up unifying house and garden under a single texture.

The project also incorporates a series of handcrafted elements that enter into dialogue with the architecture. The clay vessels and jars, the basketry, the woven fibre lamps, the solid wood furniture and the cane chairs refer to the crafts of the region and give continuity, at a domestic scale, to the same handmade logic that defines the construction.

This attention to the local runs through Zanelato’s career, for whom bioclimatic architecture, natural ventilation and the use of local materials constitute a design ethic rather than a label. At Vila Marebo this ethic translates into a light, open construction, which relies on the climate to achieve comfort and on the building tradition of the region to find its form.

Inhabiting the pause

The house acquires its full meaning in use. The fluid organisation of the programme encourages encounters, long conversations and shared leisure, and turns the routes between volumes into places to linger. Those who live in it wake to light filtered through the timber rods, feel the cool morning air drift in through the terraces and let the sea breeze set the rhythm of the day. Holidays here take on another quality, ceasing to be an interruption and becoming a way of inhabiting. The architect himself sums it up with an idea that leads back to the starting point, to the river that must be crossed to reach Caraíva. To be at Vila Marebo, he writes, is to understand that “time in Bahia moves to a different rhythm”. The house embraces that time as a condition of the project and makes it habitable.

Project: Vila Marebo.
Location: Caraíva, Porto Seguro, Bahía (Brasil).
Programme: Residencia vacacional en dos bloques con área social de doble altura, cocina abierta a zona gourmet y tres suites.
Area: 200 m².
Completed: 2025.
Architecture: Frederico Zanelato Arquitetos.
Lead architect: Frederico Zanelato.
Construction: Projetar Engenharia.
Photography: Oka fotografia.
Main materials: cal blanca, madera, vidrio, fibras naturales y varas de biriba.
Source: Frederico Zanelato.

Frederico Zanelato

Frederico Zanelato (Ribeirão Preto, 1972) came to architecture by way of craft. As a child he learned drawing, painting and sculpture at the Casa da Cultura Cândido Portinari in his home town, and as a teenager he added theatre and advertising and architectural drawing at the Bauhaus school. That early training, closer to the workshop than to the classroom, helps explain a body of work that thinks through material and the hand before it thinks through the image.

He graduated in Architecture and Urbanism from the Universidade Braz Cubas in 1999, the same year he founded his studio, Frederico Zanelato Arquitetos, based in Mogi das Cruzes, in the state of São Paulo. He went on to complete the professional master’s programme at the Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnológicas do Estado de São Paulo (IPT), where he opened a line of research spanning sustainability, economics and contemporary design that continues to guide his practice. Between 2000 and 2005 he taught Architectural Design and Drawing at Braz Cubas, and he keeps his ties to the university through lectures and workshops at architecture schools across Brazil. Since 2014 he has also worked alongside Ar:Co Arquitetura Cooperativa.

The studio works across every scale of architecture and urbanism, guided by bioclimatic architecture as method, local materials as argument and natural ventilation as a way of engaging with the climate. This way of working has given rise to projects as different as the restoration of the historic Casarão do Chá in Mogi das Cruzes, Casa ER in southern Bahia, clad in a façade of handmade ceramics, and Casa MS in the São Paulo countryside. Nearly forty collaborators have been part of the team over more than twenty-five years.

From the outset, his career has run alongside the circuit of Brazilian awards and biennials. He was selected in several editions of the Prêmio Jovens Arquitetos, with an exhibition at the Museu da Casa Brasileira, took part in five editions of the São Paulo International Architecture Biennial and received a mention at the 6th Ibero-American Biennial (2007). In recent years he has been awarded third prize at the 5th Prêmio Saint-Gobain de Arquitetura Habitat Sustentável (2018), distinctions from AsBEA and first prize at the Premiação IAB 2021, the centenary edition of the Institute of Architects of Brazil in Bahia. That same year, the Korean Institute of Architects included his work in the Hidden Architects exhibition in Seoul. His relationship with competitions runs just as deep: from the Barcelona calls for housing in the historic centre (1995) and for the headquarters of the Fundació Mies van der Rohe (1998) to a school for Guinea-Bissau (2010) and the Campus Cabral in Curitiba (2012).

A career that began among pencils and clay in Ribeirão Preto and that still measures each project by its capacity to belong to its place.

To inherit a house is to inherit far more than its walls. One inherits a certain light at certain hours, a way of moving through the rooms, a repertoire of objects and colours that for years were the everyday landscape of others. Casa Boa, the renovation Paula Ábalos has carried out in one of these terraced houses in Majadahonda, starts from that condition. The house belonged to its current owners’ grandmother, several generations lived in it and it needed a functional and aesthetic update. The architect sums up the change with a precise image: the house goes “from crochet and dark wood to lively, vital colours with a more pop-retro inspiration”. What is interesting about the project is how that leap across eras is built with the very materials of family memory.

The kitchen, origin of the colour palette

The transformation is concentrated on the ground floor. Before the renovation, the kitchen was small, awkward and closed off from the living room, and an interior toilet occupied the space next to the staircase. Ábalos removes the unnecessary partitions and opens the kitchen towards the living room and the garden façade, so that family life now unfolds in a single shared space, bright and flexible, which extends onto the terrace beneath the green awning.

It all began with a colour. The owners, who had already worked with Paula Ábalos’s architecture studio before, were clear that they wanted a kitchen with an island open to the living room and that it had to be yellow, a wish left pending in earlier projects. That soft yellow was the first decision, and from it the palette and the choice of materials for the rest of the house were developed. As a counterpoint, the kitchen hood is clad in a sky blue that turns it into an almost sculptural volume above the worktop. Floor and walls keep a neutral background with a strongly marked geometry: a small-format white tile with vanilla-toned grout that draws a grid similar to that of school handwriting paper. This pattern anchors and orders the kitchen, and looks out to the garden through two windows with oak shelves.

Oak completes the composition. It clads the tall unit that conceals the fridge, appears in the open shelves and in the circular pulls cut into the fronts, and connects with the herringbone wooden floor that runs through the rest of the floor. Over the units, a terrazzo worktop by Mosaista, with aggregate in ochre, amber and almond tones, gathers all the colours of the kitchen on a single plane. The inspiration comes from 1960s kitchens, reinterpreted from a contemporary sensibility that keeps their playful character and refines their form.

Terrazzo as memory

The staircase is where the project most clearly reveals its relationship with the history of the house. The architect keeps the original shape of the steps, but replaces the deteriorated terrazzo with natural oak treads and white risers that lighten the ascent. The original metal banister, which still did its job, stays in place; painted the same sky blue as the hood, it enters into dialogue with the kitchen and becomes part of the house’s new language.

The terrazzo removed from the staircase reappears, transformed, in other parts of the house. In addition to the kitchen worktop, it clads the walls and floors of the bathrooms with pieces by Mosaic Factory, over which float a terracotta washbasin unit and a round mirror against a peach-toned wall. For the architect, terrazzo is “a material inherent to the original identity of this house, whose memory has been preserved”. Removing it from one place and returning it in another is a subtle form of continuity, in which the material keeps the memory and changes its role.

A house to be lived in flexibly

Grandmother’s memory is also present in the furniture. The island stools and the dining chairs, by Ondarreta, have a translucent orangey amber tone reminiscent of the Duralex tableware found in homes of another era. They are joined by a dining table with a blue top and a central base in Klein blue, the modular sofa, the armchair and the wooden coffee table in the living room, as well as the terracotta table and chairs on the terrace, all by the same brand. A few pieces from the Ikea PS line introduce a more playful, organic register: the round blue trolley, the Klein blue folding lamp beside the sofa, the red-based portable lamp that appears in the kitchen and in the bedroom, and the curvy vases scattered across the tables.

In contrast to the orderly grid of the kitchen, the rest of the floor is furnished with circles and curves: round mirrors, circular tables, cut-out pulls, vases with wavy profiles. The play of geometries is deliberate. Ábalos was looking for more flexible furnishing for a space that could be lived in fluidly and changeably, and the curve accompanies that rhythm while the grid sustains the order of everyday tasks.

The result is a house that recognises itself. Its new inhabitants find in it the colours of their childhood, the texture of their grandmother’s floors and the banister they climbed so many times, now serving a more open and shared life. In a town made of houses that pass from parents to children, Casa Boa proposes a serene way of receiving an inheritance: accepting it as a starting point and letting colour do the rest.

Project: Casa Boa
Typology: Comprehensive renovation of a terraced house.
Location: Majadahonda (Madrid)
Completed: 2026
Surface area: 160 m²
Interior architecture: Paula Ábalos Arquitectura.
Photography: Sergio Pradana.
Kitchen: Cubro. Furniture: Ondarreta, Ikea PS. Kitchen worktop: Mosaista.
Bathroom terrazzo: Mosaic Factory.
Source: Paula Ábalos.

Paula Ábalos

Paula Ábalos trained as an architect at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. Before setting up her own practice, she worked at several Madrid studios, where she took part in the design and construction of distinctive residential projects in Spain and abroad. In 2019 she founded Paula Ábalos Arquitectura, a studio with a small team based on Calle Barquillo, in central Madrid, specialising in comprehensive renovations and interior design. The studio also takes on the full management of each build, from the preliminary stages through to the handover of the finished home.

Her work has focused mainly on residential projects in Madrid (Chueca, Atocha, Mirasierra, Las Tablas, Colonia Ciudad Jardín), in the surrounding area (Aravaca, Boadilla del Monte, Galapagar, Las Matas, Las Rozas, Majadahonda) and in other provinces, including Bilbao, León, Santander and Valencia.

Across all these commissions, what recurs is a method rather than a language: listening to each space in order to understand its own identity and history. Without drawing strict boundaries between architecture, interior design, furniture design or the use of materials and colour, the studio always puts each client’s needs first, seeking to transform the way they live while holding on to spatial emotion and pursuing a vibrant, contemporary aesthetic.

Paula Ábalos’s studio has close ties to traditional crafts and pursues a commitment to bespoke spaces, far from standardised formulas. Each project thus becomes an opportunity to explore new details, materials or colour palettes, which give rise to original solutions.

Since 2022 she has also led Tiny Architects, an educational project that introduces children to architecture. It runs in schools and institutions across Madrid through workshops, after-school activities and camps focused on construction, design and care for the environment.

After so many years in front of a screen, I began to feel the need to work more with my hands. I wanted to touch, to build, and to relate to materials in a more direct way.

At the same time, a number of journeys and encounters gradually drew me towards textiles. One of them was Xtant, in Mallorca, where I discovered materials, techniques and ways of working I had not known. Little by little, all of that led me to the low-warp loom.

Learning to stay

t is curious that I ended up so drawn to a technique that, in many ways, works in the opposite way to me. I am not especially good with slowness. I am restless and find it hard to spend a long time doing the same thing. The loom, by contrast, forces you to stay, to concentrate, and to accept a rhythm that cannot be hurried.

My arrival at the loom coincided with a difficult moment in my life. I had been living with chronic pain for many years and was going through a very low emotional state. I needed to find new motivations, something I could do despite my physical limitations and that would, in some way, help me reinvent myself and get out of that state. That was when I began learning to weave, first at two schools, one in Madrid and another in Barcelona, and then practising on my own.

What I did not expect was to discover that weaving begins long before the first pass of the weft. Preparing and dressing the warp can take hours, even more than a day. You have to calculate the number and length of the threads, measure them, keep them in order, take them to the loom, thread them one by one through the heddles and the reed, distribute them, and finally achieve an even tension. It is probably the most tedious part of the whole process, and for many hours you also have the feeling that nothing is happening yet. All you see is threads and more threads.

There is a book on weaving whose introduction made me laugh, because the author recounts how, after spending practically the whole day dressing a warp without having even started to weave, she asks herself: “Why on earth did I get myself into this mess?” I felt completely identified.

But when everything is finally ready, the process changes completely. After that first part, so technical, slow and precise, another, much more open one begins. The warp is already there, holding everything up, and then I can start to play: changing materials and densities, leaving gaps, building forms, trying something without knowing whether it will work.

I think that is why the loom suits me in a somewhat strange way. Two almost opposite ways of working coexist in it: one needs order, calculation and patience; the other, curiosity, play and the ability to change direction.

And there is something more the loom has taught me: silence. I can spend hours weaving and enter a state of very deep concentration. For me it has become a form of meditation, a way of quieting the mind and being completely present in what I am doing.

Letting the materials lead

An important part of my work has to do with materials. I like to seek out unusual fibres and discover what happens when they reach the loom. I work mainly with natural fibres from Japan, India and Spain, among them hemp, ramie, cotton, nettle, linen, jute, silks, banana fibre, pineapple thread, seaweed, plant barks, water hyacinth, mulberry paper and various paper yarns and cords.

In my latest collaboration I incorporated paper itself as weft, after working it beforehand, as well as different fabrics. I am interested in the possibility of thinking about the weft in a much more open way: not necessarily as a thread, but as any material that can pass through the warp and become part of the weave.

Many of these materials are irregular, fragile and very alive, and that is why they attract me. They do not all behave in the same way or allow you to work with them in the same way. Some fibres withstand a great deal of tension and others break straight away. Some are rigid, others almost disappear. Some allow you to build volume and others work better leaving air and space between the threads.

Much of the work consists of testing them and observing how they behave, how they respond to tension and what possibilities they hold within the weave. Sometimes it is simply a matter of finding out whether a material can be woven, what form it can build, or what happens when I try to use it in a way for which, in principle, it was never intended.

Weaving also involves many mistakes. A thread that breaks, a tension that shifts, something that does not turn out exactly as you had imagined. For someone as demanding as I am, learning to live with that has also been part of the process. There is a line from The Creative Act that I love: “When the work has five flaws, it is not yet finished. When it has eight flaws, it may well be.” I like it because it sums up something I have had to learn along the way: not everything that departs from what was planned necessarily needs correcting.

Crossing the limits of the loom

That way of working has meant that, little by little, weaving has come into contact with other materials. Cement, ceramics and aluminium appeared in some pieces, and with them entirely new problems: how to support a piece, how to join two materials, how much weight a structure can bear, or how to make something very rigid coexist with something extremely flexible.

And then I find myself doing things I do not know how to do.

I especially enjoy that part. Suddenly I have to learn some carpentry, find a way of working metal, run tests with cement or ceramics, or ask for help from someone who knows far more than I do. Not knowing how to solve something rarely makes me abandon an idea; usually it makes me want to find out how to do it.

Perhaps that is why I have never felt that the loom has to set the limits of my work. It is a fundamental tool for me, but also a starting point. A piece can begin on the loom and end up closer to sculpture, need a structure, incorporate a completely different material, or even lead me to abandon the initial idea.

Nor am I particularly interested in deciding whether something is weaving, sculpture, design or anything else. Having worked across different disciplines for so many years, it feels increasingly natural to use whatever I need at each moment.

I am also fortunate not to depend financially on my artistic production. That allows me to work without the obligation to produce constantly, complete collections or maintain a particular line. I can spend a long time researching something that may never become a work, simply because it interests me.

That freedom is very important to me. It allows me to play, to make mistakes, to abandon something and come back to it later. Not everything I make has to end up as a piece, and perhaps one of the things I have most had to learn over these years is not knowing in advance where I will end up.

Occupying space

Recently, while listening to a talk about Aurèlia Muñoz, one idea stayed with me in particular: the thought that a work is never a completely isolated object, and that the space in which it will be placed is also part of it.

It is something I think about more and more as I work. A piece changes completely depending on where it is, on the light, on the distance from which it is seen, or on what happens around it. Some works need a wall and others need to move away from it and begin to occupy space.

I am also very drawn to the textile’s capacity to shift in scale and presence. It can be very dense, carry great visual weight and almost become a mass, but it can also become extremely light, transparent, mobile, or almost disappear.

Lately I feel like exploring that second possibility further: taking the weave off the flat plane, letting it occupy space, and seeing what happens when it begins to relate more directly to architecture.

Sharing the process

In that talk about Aurèlia Muñoz, an expression came up that I liked very much: “kindred spirits”. Understood not necessarily in an intimate sense, but as those people who appear at certain moments and manage to shift you out of your place, teach you something you do not know, or make you look at your own work differently.

I think I value those encounters more and more. They may be other artists, people who work with materials or techniques I am unfamiliar with, but also people who connect others and can open a door to a space, an exhibition or a possibility that you, on your own, might never even have imagined.

For a long time my way of working was fairly solitary. Over the past year, however, I have begun to particularly enjoy shared processes. When you work with someone else, you have to give up part of the control. An idea of yours passes through another person’s eyes and hands and comes back transformed. The result no longer depends solely on your own decisions.

That is what interests me especially now: someone taking me beyond what I already know how to do. Working with people who know other materials, other techniques, or who simply see things differently. Less to add two separate bodies of work together than to build something neither of us would have made alone.

And here play appears once again as a form of learning: testing, making mistakes, changing direction, or finding a solution that was never planned. When the process is shared, all of that changes, because you are no longer the one who decides where everything has to go.

Photography:
Olga Blanco. @la.mata.flores

This approach is now outdated. Contemporary housing recognises ever more clearly that ages with different needs live together under one roof, and that living together improves when each finds its own space. To the old separation between the shared and the intimate is thus added a second boundary, subtler and perhaps more revealing, the one that distinguishes the universe of adults from that of children. What Pia Capdevila proposes in this project is to give each generation a place made to its measure within a home that is still shared. For the parents, a serene, sociable floor open to the outside. For the children, a territory with its own rules, where play, study and rest are ordered with an autonomy rarely found in domestic layouts.

The duplex that Pia Capdevila has renovated in Barcelona makes that second boundary the argument of the entire project. The ground floor brings together the social life of the house and the main suite, and the upper floor is given over entirely to the children. Between the two, a new staircase acts as a threshold between two ways of living that nonetheless share the same material language.

The original home was fragmented into closed rooms, crossed by narrow corridors and forced circulation routes. It resolved the relationship between its two levels with a poorly placed staircase that hindered more than it connected. The interior designer decided to begin precisely there. Relocating and redesigning the vertical circulation was the strategic operation from which the new hierarchy of uses derived. Once where and how one goes upstairs had been resolved, each floor could take on a precise identity and the whole house found its order.

The adults’ floor

On the ground floor, what was once a succession of closed rooms, entrance hall, kitchen, living room and a bedroom, has been transformed into a single social space where kitchen, dining and living areas coexist without barriers. The opening up enlarges the perception of space and, above all, allows the light that floods the living room terrace to cross the home until it reaches the entrance of the house. Now, on entering the home, a hallway opens onto the kitchen, with a wooden console, which marks the welcome and a divider unit of open shelving, which screens but lets the light through.

The kitchen, open, retains an identity of its own. A continuous storage wall, floor to ceiling, brings together the oven and microwave column, the sink area, the breakfast unit and general storage. A central island concentrates the hob and the main work surface, leads naturally towards the dining room and orders the space without the need for partitions. The fronts in English green, combined with wood finishes, add depth and converse with the warmth of the oak laminate flooring by Neoparquet, which runs through both floors as the connecting thread of the whole house.

The dining room occupies the natural passage between the kitchen and the living room, and that intermediate position reinforces the sequence of the space. Cooking, enjoying the table and conversation form part of the same story.

The living room is organised around a large sofa facing the terrace, attentive to everyday comfort and to the visual relationship with the outside. A custom-designed TV unit, which incorporates the fireplace, acts as a fixed piece that orders the room. Beside it, an armchair by Andreu World defines a small reading corner within the living area.

The terrace is experienced as a true extension of the living room. A pergola allows it to be used all year round. The project carries out to it the same chromatic atmosphere as the interior, made of greens, stone and earth tones, with microcement finishes that give a sober, homogeneous image.

The parents’ private space

On the other side of the kitchen begins the most private part of the floor. The corridor leading to the main bedroom incorporates a large floor-to-ceiling wardrobe that makes use of the space under the stairs and serves a dual function: it extends the storage supporting the kitchen and houses the laundry area. It thus compactly resolves an important domestic need without adding separate service rooms.

The suite’s bedroom has been built from a serene palette and a careful layering of textures with walls in sand-toned stucco, textiles and upholstery that answer one another and a custom-designed headboard. A private terrace increases the entry of natural light and extends the bedroom towards the outside.

In the bathroom, a wide countertop with two rounded washbasins faces a shower of generous dimensions. The space is built from a dialogue between the soft greens of the ceramic wall and the textiles, the sand tones of cladding and countertop, and the black counterpoint of taps and frames. A sliding door in translucent glass lets the light from the bedroom reach the inside of the bathroom.

The staircase as threshold

In that same stretch stands the new staircase, the decision on which the entire project rests. Its relocation and new layout make moving from one floor to the other more comfortable, but its true scope is conceptual. The element that once hindered life in the house has become the threshold that separates and at the same time unites the world of adults and that of children. Going upstairs means changing territory.

The children’s territory

The upper floor belongs entirely to the children, and its attic character is embraced as a trait of identity. The geometry of the roof, with its slopes and corners, offers a scale closer to childhood and makes each space singular. Several roof windows opened at strategic points multiply the entry of natural light and compensate for the slope of the ceiling with a bright, open feeling.

At the top of the stairs a play and rest area, equipped with floor mattresses and low furniture, functions as a small living room made to the children’s measure, a flexible place to lie down, play or get together with friends.

Close by is the bathroom the siblings share, which concentrates the floor’s service fixtures and eases everyday routines. The study area occupies a central position, between the staircase and the way to the bedrooms. A large desk with storage and an upper unit of open shelving keep the workspace tidy and allow the bedrooms to remain free of that function. Wood and ochre yellow introduce a livelier note here, creating an atmosphere that is stimulating and at the same time restrained.

Before reaching the rooms, the hallway houses a shared dressing room. The solution frees up space inside the bedrooms, which are devoted to rest and personal life. It also concentrates storage in an intermediate piece that makes efficient use of the junctions with the roof, something especially valuable on a floor of such complex geometry.

The two children’s bedrooms respond to the singularity of the attic and to the wish to give each one its own identity within a shared language. Both include a reading corner, which makes them rooms for spending time in as well as for sleeping. Colour establishes a subtle variation between them: in one, green is the base and terracotta the accent, and in the other the relationship is reversed. The result is a visual narrative that is coherent between the two rooms and, at the same time, very personal.

Two territories, one house

The most valuable aspect of this project lies in the way the layout is placed at the service of a way of living together. The house is now lived by generations. Downstairs, adult life finds calm, light and a close relationship with the outside. Upstairs, the children have a place that belongs to them, where they can grow up with a certain autonomy while still feeling close. The oak of the floor, the greens and the earth tones that run through both floors are a reminder that this separation is, above all, a form of care, and that the two worlds remain part of the same home.

Project: Comprehensive renovation of a family duplex.
Type: Urban home.
Location: Avda. Roma. Barcelona.
Area: 160 m².
Completed: 2026.
Scope: Interior design and decoration project.
Interior design and decoration: Pia Capdevila Interiorismo.
Photography: Jordi Canosa.
Styling: Mar Gausachs.
Source: MasMedia. Marta Alonso.

Pia Capdevila

Pia Capdevila belongs to a generation of interior designers who have been able to interpret the contemporary home through sensitivity and everyday experience. Born into a family connected to architecture, her vocation for built space arose naturally, understanding from a very young age that the home is much more than a functional place: it is the setting of life, of intimacy and of memory. See full biography.