Gon Architects transforms a compartmentalised flat in Madrid’s Argüelles neighbourhood into a single open space, dissolving the boundaries between rooms

Argüelles is one of those Madrid neighbourhoods that carry the history of the city written in their facades. Laid out from the Plan Castro of 1860, which defined Madrid’s ensanche with an orthogonal grid of deep city blocks and interior courtyards, the neighbourhood grew as a domestic stage for the liberal bourgeoisie of the turn of the century. Its wide streets, its buildings with high ceilings and generous proportions form a fabric that today coexists with the university life of Moncloa, the commerce of Calle Princesa and the leafy quiet of the Parque del Oeste. It is a neighbourhood that has aged with dignity, accumulating layers without losing coherence, offering scale without imposing monumentality.

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.

Project by Gon Architects