“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.”

More than a place on the map, l’Empordà is a way of looking. Those of us who have lived there have savoured it. The light has weight, the wind has character and the forest, when left to itself, ends up ordering life. It is also the land of Susanna Cots, who from her studio in Peratallada has spent twenty-five years translating that gaze into interior space, as we showed in the monograph we devoted to her last spring.

In one of those forests, among century-old cedars and pines, lies Refuge in the Woods, the interior designer’s most recent project. A single-storey house, white, with a dark roof and stone walls, transformed for a couple of Scandinavian origin whose brief fitted into a single word: light. Everything else has been built from there, with an aim that inspires every decision in the project: that the forest should always be the protagonist.

The forest inhabits the interior

Susanna has designed the spaces so that each opening frames a fragment of the outdoors and brings it into the house like a living painting that changes with the seasons, with the time of day, with the rain falling on the leaves. In the indoor dining room, wrapped entirely in oak—floor, walls and ceiling in continuity—a large window frames the lawn and the cedars as if it were the room’s only artwork. In the living room, the natural pine joinery opens the view towards the pool and the vegetation, while the fireplace, set into a freestanding white volume, gathers the family around the fire on the days when the forest calls for retreat.

The palette accompanies this intention with discipline. Whites and stone tones broaden the perception of space and let natural light travel through each room without obstacles; the pale oak of the flooring and the timber of the joinery bring the warmth needed for that brightness to feel liveable. Chromatic neutrality works here as a resource rather than an aesthetic end. When the interior falls silent, the green of the forest appears in all its intensity. It is an idea very present in Susanna’s thinking: she understands light as an emotional language capable of activating, calming or gathering, and has learned, as she herself writes, to “tame light” so that it dialogues with the space and with the emotions of those who inhabit it.

The greenhouse, a seam between inside and out

The space at the heart of the project is the greenhouse. A light timber structure, with exposed beams and a grid of window frames that blends with the tree trunks in the garden, raised on a rubble-stone base reminiscent of the dry-stone walls of the Empordà landscape. At one with its surroundings, almost dissolved in them, it works as a refuge that inhabits winter and summer without losing its nature. It is the natural extension of the house, the place where light lingers longest and where the boundary between outside and inside dissolves.

Inside, a continuous timber bench runs along the perimeter on the stone base and turns the glass into a backrest for the landscape, with striped linen cushions and checks in earthy tones. Round jute rugs, low turned-wood tables and comfortable armchairs compose a living room that seems suspended in the garden; a few steps further on, beneath a cluster of natural-fibre lamps, a long table hosts shared meals and long after-dinner conversations. Outside, a black summer kitchen, sheltered under eaves from which the branches of a cedar hang down, completes these spaces, where the forest takes on its role as the main room.

A space tailored to every moment

The programme is precisely adjusted to the lives of its inhabitants. Two suites designed for rest, a study for moments of concentration and a shared area—kitchen and indoor living room—that sustains everyday life. In the suites, wood clads the headboard wall and the joinery frames the view towards the pool and the trees, so the day already begins facing the forest. The bathrooms work with a more tactile materiality: walls with a mineral finish, stone washbasins, aged brass taps and wooden mirrors, under overhead light that softly models the space.

The kitchen, white and linear, leads to a glazed door that opens onto the pool terrace, and shares the fireplace space with the living room, which acts both as a divider and as a meeting point. Both the kitchen and the rest of the furniture have been custom designed by the studio. Each piece responds to the exact place it occupies, to the light it receives, to the use for which it is intended. It is the quiet application of what Susanna calls the method of invisible elements, that which sustains the experience without needing to show itself. “Make the complex simple, make it go unnoticed”, sums up the interior designer.

A house to enjoy the light of l’Empordà

For a family from the north, where light is managed as a scarce commodity, settling in l’Empordà means learning to live with a different light, more generous and changeable. Refuge in the Woods accompanies that learning with discretion. Susanna Cots has designed a house that orders itself according to the rhythm of the forest, that changes with it and that accepts, as she maintains, that the home should be a reflection of our vital flow, just as a landscape evolves with the seasons. An architecture that, in the interior designer’s words, “is not explained, it is breathed”. And that, in this land of tramontana and clear skies, breathes in time with the trees.

Project: Refuge in the Woods.
Location: Empordà, Girona.
Layout: 2 suites, study, kitchen and indoor living room, greenhouse, outdoor dining and living areas.
Completed: 2026.
Interior design: Susanna Cots Interior Design.
Photography: Mauricio Fuertes.
Source: Susanna Cots Interior Design.

Susanna Cots

Some careers are built with projects, others, like that of Susanna Cots, with a way of seeing. From her first studio in l’Empordà in 2001 to her international expansion—with a second office in Hong Kong in 2014—her work has evolved as an ongoing investigation into emotional wellbeing. As a tangible experience: light, silence, memory and perception.

Few interior designers in Spain have developed a language as recognisable and coherent as that of Susanna Cots. Her work, born of a deep connection with nature and emotional wellbeing, unfolds from her studio in l’Empordà—a setting of serene beauty that permeates her creative philosophy—and has been recognised both nationally and internationally for its aesthetic and conceptual sensitivity.

Cots’s career is marked by a constant search for balance. Balance between light and shadow, fullness and emptiness, geometry and emotion. In her projects, spaces open up to silence and introspection, turning the everyday into an almost meditative experience. Natural light, noble materials and organic forms are the common threads of a narrative that speaks of wellbeing, honesty and essential beauty.

Her vision goes beyond decoration: it is a way of inhabiting. Each project is an invitation to reconnect with what matters, to reduce the superfluous and to embrace the harmony of simplicity. From private homes to boutique hotels and commercial spaces, Susanna Cots cultivates a style that transcends fashion and belongs to an aesthetic of the soul.

Behind the calm her interiors convey lies rigorous work, a deep knowledge of detail and a finely tuned intuition that reads each space with empathy. Because for Susanna Cots, designing is, above all, caring.

That ambition left a domestic heritage that is still recognisable at first glance today: stately houses with high ceilings, mouldings, balconies overlooking the street and wooden floors, some still with carriage entrances in their doorways. More than a century and a half later, the district retains that grammar, even though its life has changed in scale and the arrival of international buyers has driven the renovation of numerous homes. Much of what happens behind its façades is decided in that tension between permanence and change, because renovating a home in the Salamanca district demands, above all, listening to what the building already says.

Recovering character

This home on General Oráa street, of nearly 300 m², had been renovated years earlier, but along the way it had lost the stately character that belonged both to its architecture and to the building in which it stands. Its new owners, a young family with a dynamic pace of life, closely tied to travel, sought in it precisely the opposite of that haste: a serene, functional and timeless house, a refuge. That was the brief Tristán Domecq’s studio received: to give the house back the coherence that belonged to it.

The work began with what is most structural and least visible, the proportions of each room, true to one of the interior designer’s convictions: “elegance has more to do with proportions than with styles”. It continued with the reinstatement of cornices, coves and mouldings in keeping with the period and spirit of the building, until the envelope once again behaved as the stable, serene frame of domestic life.

The living areas as a sequence

On that basis, the project arranges the living areas as a sequence. The living room and dining room follow one another in a single elongated space, bathed in light from the tall windows and softened by linen curtains, with walls in ecru tones where moulded panels add rhythm. At the far end, a wide opening framed in grey stone and closed by glass sliding doors with bronze frames leads into the study, so that the eye travels through the house from room to room, as it did in the great stately apartments of this district, where the rooms opened one onto the next. Domecq links this arrangement to a very Madrilenian sensibility, that of the large urban apartments with connected spaces, where social and family life unfolds in common areas that clients in the city particularly value. An oak floor laid in a chevron pattern runs through the main spaces and binds the sequence together with a single texture.

The studio sums up the intention as a balance in which the architecture provides permanence and character, while the furniture, materials and bespoke solutions introduce a contemporaneity that dispenses with passing trends. In the living room, two large curved sofas, travertine coffee tables with organic outlines and a light-toned rug coexist with an antique side table on a turned pedestal, cane armchairs and a large-format painting whose colour vibrates against the neutral background.

Wood as language

If stone and mouldings restore the house’s architectural dignity, wood gives it a voice of its own. Bespoke joinery and furniture take on a fundamental role here, because they allow architecture and interior design to speak the same language. The study is the most eloquent example: lined with warm wood panels, it incorporates a bookcase that works almost as an architectural element, with white uprights that order the shelves and add depth to the perspective that opens up from the living room. There, a mid-20th-century desk, an Italian articulated-arm lamp and a black leather armchair make up a work corner with the character of a private library.

The kitchen, designed entirely to measure, takes that same philosophy to its most refined expression. Wood panelling wraps the walls and conceals storage and appliances, while a thick stone worktop with rounded edges tops a white island with soft forms. The result is a functional and serene space, in which each element answers to the whole and craftsmanship can be felt in the precision of the joints and the warmth of the material.

The dining room revolves around the Mesa Bilbao, from the t-domecq collection, designed as the social heart of the home. Its oval oak top has a scale and proportions intended to encourage conversation and gathering, and the upholstered chairs with wooden frames accompany its gentle geometry. Behind it, a large canvas in earthy tones acts almost as a tapestry, and to one side a dark wood cabinet with fluted glass adds depth and counterpoint.

Several periods live together naturally

The design starts from the real needs of those who live in the house and their way of living in it, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the girls’ bedroom. The bunk beds, built in light oak, rise vertically to make the most of the home’s generous ceiling height; in Domecq’s words, they manage to “reveal the height of the house, which was there, but went unnoticed”. Each bed thus becomes a small refuge with wavy-edged shelves, a reading light and curtains of its own. Two built-in benches with striped cushions and storage complete the space; one of them, by the window, offers a place to read or look out onto the street, while the fabric lamps with dark piping add a touch of lightness.

The bedrooms and bathrooms extend that same atmosphere in different registers. In the main bedroom, an antique chest of drawers with Egyptian motifs, a colonial-inspired leather armchair and a deep-pile wool rug converse with almost bare walls and framed graphic works. In the bathroom, grey stone is carved into the washbasin and frames the window, and a fluted glass door with dark framing separates the freestanding bath, bathed in natural light.

Among the pieces that define the character of the house is an original mirror dated to around 1780, crowned by a finely carved wooden pediment. Its presence alongside contemporary furniture distils the intention of the project, which the studio itself frames as the desire to “create an interior in which different periods can coexist naturally and coherently”. It is also the idea that has run through the district since its origins: a city that renews itself without letting go of its memory.

This General Oráa home thus recovers its architectural and stately character without renouncing a contemporary way of life. Conceived as a refuge, it is a house where proportions, materials, craftsmanship and the selection of each piece build a serene atmosphere, and where the Marquis of Salamanca’s Ensanche can be recognised once more, now inhabited by a family of our time. Domecq sums it up in the aspiration that guides his work: to build “a house that seems inevitable, as if it had always been that way”.

Project: Vivienda General Oráa.
Location: General Oráa. Barrio de Salamanca. Madrid.
Surface area:  300 m².
Completed: 2026.
Interior design: t-domecq Studio + Store.
Construction: Somos Arista.
Photography:  Belén Imaz.
Styling: Amaya de Toledo.
Featured furniture:  Mesa Bilbao, colección t-domecq.
Source: t-domecq Studio + Store Comunicación. Jimena Azinovic.

Tristán Domecq

Tristán Domecq (Vigo, 1982) came to interior design by a path rarely taken in the profession: that of practice. He grew up in a family where design was a familiar language —his mother and a great-uncle were decorators, and the family counts several architects among its members—, and as a child he would cycle around the building sites of his city to watch how buildings were constructed. That early curiosity found a first outlet in his mother’s home décor shop, before he left for Madrid, to study, at the age of eighteen.

He studied Business Administration and Management and spent three years at Inditex, a period he himself considers decisive: there he learned management, sales analysis and the logic of the production processes that his companies put into practice today. The turning point came in 2012, almost by chance, with the renovation of his own home: an 1890 house in central Madrid, practically intact, which he stripped out completely while keeping what was worth saving —the doors, part of the floors— to adapt it to the layout of our time. He took on both the design and the building work himself and learned the craft by doing it. That house brought his first clients, and within three months he was already building a team.

The studio grew from his own home to occupy successive premises in Embajadores, Huertas and Ruiz de Alarcón, and with it a model took shape that sets Domecq apart in the Spanish interior design landscape: design and execution within a single company. Alongside the studio, which designs each space, an in-house construction company –Somos Arista–  carries out the works, allowing him to control the result from start to finish and to offer the client a single point of contact.

Domecq defines his language as “sober and timeless”: neutral bases, noble materials —wood, stone, marble, iron, linen—, light that is always warm and a deliberate mix of periods in which the antique or vintage piece, often rescued from the Rastro flea market or brought from abroad, enters into dialogue with contemporary furniture and with art. He works hand in hand with marble workers, blacksmiths, carpenters and stonemasons, convinced that good design depends on a craft capable of executing it, and understands the home as something that is only complete once inhabited: “a house is finished when it is lived in”, he maintains.

That holistic vision —in which, in his words, the business outlook and the creative one carry equal weight— took physical form in 2021 with the opening of Tristán Domecq Casa, in Madrid’s Salamanca district, at the heart of the traditional circuit of textile showrooms and interior design shops. Its more than 380 square metres bring together a shop, an interior design studio, architecture and construction, a warehouse and an events space. Alongside antiques, objects and textiles, it sells furniture and lighting pieces designed by the studio and manufactured in Madrid, many of them bespoke. Preceded by an online shop, the concept store closes a circle that accompanies the client from the building works through to the choice of furniture and decorative objects.

His own home, a 1940s house in the north of Madrid that he restored with respect for its original architecture, serves as a laboratory: there he tests lime renders, natural pigments and new combinations before bringing them to his clients’ projects. Amid the garden, the vegetable patch and an art collection he constantly renews, Domecq cultivates the idea that forms the backbone of all his work: luxury lies in a home that reflects the person who lives in it.

Kitchen and dining room take centre stage in the day zone

The designer conceives the day zone as a continuous sequence of living room, dining room and kitchen, oriented toward the windows that surround the entire space and flood it with light. The kitchen, with its sculptural ribbed island, and the dining area, with the Bok table by Ethnicraft and the Drawn chairs — emblematic pieces of Danish design created by Hvidt & Mølgaard in 1956 — take centre stage in this space, together with a small olive tree that gives the project its name and provides its most poetic detail.

The natural oak herringbone flooring runs throughout the apartment, unifying the rooms and reinforcing the sense of spaciousness.

The curve, an architectural concept running through the whole project

The curve, an architectural concept developed by the designer, reaches its fullest expression in the bedroom. An arch envelops the headboard and, reinforced by warm indirect lighting, turns rest into a sensory experience. That same language reappears in mirrors, shelves and nightstands, in small gestures that speak to one another. “My designs say a lot about who I am, about what I feel when I walk into an empty space and imagine it full of life, of calm, of light, of the essential,” explains Marga Lara.

The geometric flooring by Mosaic Factory

The bathroom occupies the central axis of the floor plan, acting as a hinge between the day zone and the night zone. Here, the leading role belongs to the geometric flooring by Mosaic Factory, in ochre and cream tones, which introduces movement and character almost like a ceramic rug. The brass taps and wall lights, the slatted wood of the vanity unit and the indirect lighting soften the strength of the pattern and bring warmth to the space. “I love clean, very orderly spaces, where no element is left in view to disrupt the harmony of the room,” notes the designer — an idea that also carries over into the adjoining dressing room, resolved with clean-lined white wardrobes, curved wooden shelves and a golden metal structure that adds a note of discreet sophistication.

The materiality of the whole responds to a warm minimalism. Natural oak, off-white, plant fibres, ceramic and brass build a soft, liveable interior, where gold accents bring sophistication to lamps and mirrors, and wood brings order and visually connects the rooms. La Casa del Olivo shows that a restrained palette can be rich when worked through texture, light and proportion, achieving an apartment that is coherent, luminous and unmistakably its own.

Furniture and Lighting

Kitchen: Furniture by Dica. Countertop by Neolith. Taps by Icónico.
Dining room: Bok dining table by Ethnicraft. Gold metal ceiling lamp by &Tradition. Floor lamp with ceramic base and brass-framed mirror by HK Living. Drawn chairs designed by Hvidt & Mølgaard for &Tradition.
Bathroom: Tiles by Mosaic Factory. Taps by Icónico. Wall lights by Aromas del Campo.

Project: La casa del olivo.
Location: Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
Intervention: Full renovation.
Area: 51 m².
Finished: 2026.
Interior design: Marga Lara.
Photography: Silvia Gil Roldán.
Source: Marta Alonso Serrano.

Marga Lara

Marga Lara (Tacoronte, Tenerife, 1987) is a technical architect and interior designer, founder of Marga Lara Interiorismo, a studio based in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. She trains in technical architecture at the Universidad de La Laguna (2006-2013) and completes her training in interior design with the Master’s degree from Insenia Design School Madrid (2014-2015), the school where she currently teaches.

Her professional career begins in Madrid, where she develops interior design and technical architecture projects at the studios Loft&Reforms and Dimensi-on. Back in the Canary Islands, she works at Vivespacio Interiores before founding her own studio in 2019, the year in which she also begins her collaboration as designer and technical advisor for the Concep pharmacy chain.

Her work is defined by warm minimalism: residential and commercial spaces that prioritize natural light, noble materials and serene atmospheres, apart from passing trends. She approaches each project from honesty and functionality, with the aim of building spaces with soul, capable of reflecting the personality of those who inhabit them.

The village was also, for generations, a whaling enclave, and that memory remains written into the name of one of its oldest quarters: the barrio de los Balleneros, a tight cluster of cobbled streets where fishermen’s houses stand alongside several manor houses and buildings bearing coats of arms, all of them turned towards the same horizon that shifts with every corner —the harbour, the Sierra del Sueve, the Picos de Europa in the distance—. It is precisely in this quarter, amid the thick walls, small openings and timber structures that define the vernacular architecture of Lastres, that Antonio Antequera and his studio Extrarradio intervene in a 70 m² dwelling aptly named Casa Ballenero.

The house’s structure speaks again

The house arrived at the project bearing the usual scars of decades of use. Partitions added without any clear logic, and false ceilings that had cut back the original height and darkened rooms that, once, had not been dark at all. Antonio Antequera responds with an idea that is radical in its simplicity: stripping the house of everything superimposed upon it, and letting its own structure speak again.

The interior partitions come down, exposing the timber floor structures, which are reinforced and left visible as part of the final finish. The floor plan thus recovers, in one stroke, the height it had lost; the air begins to cross the house from one end to the other, and the views —inward, and out towards the sea— multiply. What until then had been a structure hidden beneath layers of successive renovations comes to literally support the entire argument of the project.

Furniture with an architectural function

With the volume freed, Extrarradio avoids the most predictable route and does not raise a single new partition wall. Instead, it places within the space pieces of furniture that function as interior architecture —blocks that store, cook, conceal the bathroom or give way to the staircase— distributing the domestic programme between them without resorting to a single wall. Each piece marks a threshold without ever closing anything off completely: the house can be taken in at a glance from any point, even as each corner retains its own degree of privacy.

The language of these volumes is deliberately sober: bold, unadorned forms, painted in shades of blue and white that bounce the light and, by contrast, further darken the timber beams crossing the ceiling. Kitchen and staircase share a single lightweight body —little more than a piece of furniture acting as a partition— that never cuts off the view from one end of the house to the other.

The bathroom occupies another of these volumes, one that stops short of the ceiling. This gesture of closing off only what is necessary is enough to provide privacy without giving up the reading of the whole: from any corner of the house, its full volume can still be sensed. Inside, water-resistant materials and a neutral palette ensure that the protagonist remains the structure, not the bathroom.

The attic turned into a bedroom

Under the roof, what for years was an attic full of old junk is now a bedroom. The intervention resolves only what is strictly necessary —insulation and a new, levelled floor— and leaves the rest as it was. The sloped structure of the roof remains exposed, true to a house that, in every room, insists on showing what holds it up.

Casa Ballenero does not disguise what it is: a vernacular building —wide walls, exposed timber, openings kept to the essential— from which the noise accumulated over time has been stripped away. In a quarter whose very name carries the seafaring trade that gave this village life for generations, the house is inhabited once again through its own structure, with the sea present, once more, in every room.

Project: Casa Ballenero.
Location: Lastres, Asturias.
Typology: Residencial.
Area: 70 m².
Completed: Marzo 2026.
Architect: Antonio Antequera Reviriego. Extrarradio Estudio.
Collaborators: Estudio Copla.
Builder: Carpintería Zarabozo.
Photography: Sara Cuerdo.
Source: Extrarradio.

Antonio Antequera. Extrarradio Estudio

Antonio Antequera (Madrid, 1987) se forma como arquitecto en la Universidad Técnica de Arquitectura de A Coruña y la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Antes de dirigir su propio estudio pasa varios años trabajando en estudios de referencia en España e Italia, una etapa que resulta determinante en la manera en que después entenderá su propia práctica: más que como un ejercicio de autor, como una disciplina que se aprende oficio a oficio, obra a obra.

En 2017 se incorpora a Massimo Adario Architetti, en Roma, donde permanece un año. A su regreso a Madrid trabaja en PCM, en Langarita-Navarro Arquitectos y como arquitecto senior en SEGIPSA, la sociedad estatal de gestión inmobiliaria de patrimonio. Este recorrido por estudios de escalas y sensibilidades distintas —desde la vivienda hasta el patrimonio público, desde Madrid hasta Roma— construye un criterio propio que le permite asumir la responsabilidad de proyectar en solitario.

Extrarradio nace en 2021 en Madrid. El nombre ya anuncia una posición, la de un estudio que no busca el centro ni la grandilocuencia, sino que trabaja desde la periferia entendida como lugar de creación. Su método parte de la superposición de capas, físicas y simbólicas, texturas, estratos históricos y referencias personales de quien habita cada proyecto, como mecanismo para construir espacios con una carga narrativa propia, ajustados a las particularidades de sus habitantes.

El estudio se mueve con la misma naturalidad entre la obra nueva y la intervención sobre edificios existentes. En ambos casos, el punto de partida es un análisis exhaustivo del contexto físico y cultural del encargo, que se traduce después en soluciones que integran diseño contemporáneo con sistemas constructivos rigurosos y eficientes. La atención al detalle, el control de los procesos de ejecución y una selección consciente de materiales son constantes en cada proyecto, con independencia de su escala o presupuesto.

Algunos de sus proyectos nos hablan de su forma de entender la arquitectura: En TET, una vivienda adosada de los años cuarenta de 68 m² en el barrio madrileño de Carabanchel, Extrarradio reduce primero la casa a su estructura esencial —vigas, muros de carga, cerchas de cubierta— para después trazar un zigzag pintado en verde que recorre la planta baja y une cocina, aseo, escaleras, bancos y una bañera exterior en un único gesto continuo. Antequera lo resume así: la casa debía transmitir “su modo de vida, desenfadado y creativo”, el de un cliente vinculado a la industria musical. El color, aplicado con precisión conceptual, actúa aquí como columna vertebral del proyecto más que como acabado.

En Zissou, la sede de una productora audiovisual de 135 m² en el madrileño barrio de Tetuán, el estudio sustituye la sucesión tradicional de despachos por un recorrido continuo organizado en torno a una mesa que va cambiado de función, escritorio compartido, mesa de reuniones o cocina. Las plantas integradas en el mobiliario introducen separaciones suaves entre equipos sin fragmentar la oficina, y el sótano se reserva como sala de mezclas y producción, el único cambio de registro acústico de todo el proyecto.

En Sierra de Gredos, un presupuesto ajustado y una normativa restrictiva en superficie construible dan lugar a una cabaña de 60 m² que amplía un antiguo cobertizo agrícola en sección, no en planta. Un cascarón cerámico envuelve cubierta y fachadas, semienterrado y orientado para dialogar con las construcciones tradicionales de la zona, mientras que dentro, un volumen de madera azul que aloja cocina, baño y dormitorio en altillo se posa en el espacio diáfano sin tocar sus paredes. El propio arquitecto la describe como “una pequeña nave habitada”, pensada para reconectar con la naturaleza y con el origen familiar de la parcela.

Los tres proyectos, tan distintos en programa y escala, comparten una misma lógica de trabajo: reducir antes de añadir, encontrar en la estructura existente —o en la esencial— el soporte expresivo del proyecto, y resolver el programa mediante piezas de mobiliario que ordenan sin compartimentar. Extrarradio entiende la arquitectura como una disciplina que desarrolla memoria, técnica y habitabilidad, proponiendo espacios que no solo responden a requerimientos funcionales, sino que construyen significados y vínculos duraderos con quienes los habitan.

It is in this setting that the house María José Auñón Cabrera has fully renovated is found, a house that until now followed a Central European-inspired aesthetic, foreign to this stretch of the Alicante Costa Blanca. The owners wanted to recover a warm, Mediterranean way of living in keeping with their surroundings, while preserving the original clay flooring found throughout the house.

The clay floor, key to its new identity

Clay floors are once again taking centre stage in interior design, valued for their beauty, insulating capacity, easy upkeep and, above all, their natural, artisanal character. The interior designer not only preserves them, but turns them into the key to the house’s new identity. Their warm tones define a palette completed with off-whites, oak wood, plant fibres and linen. The result is a house where every material points back to the same origin, with no contrasts to break the continuity between rooms.

This continuity is felt most clearly when walking through the ground floor. The living room, arranged around a low-lined modular sofa, opens onto the dining room through the same clay flooring, natural-fibre rugs and light filtered through linen textiles. The staircase, clad in the same ceramic material, visually unfolds the home’s different levels without interrupting the reading of the whole. In the dining room, the solid wood table, custom-designed by the studio, occupies the centre of the space and organises the Wishbone chairs by Carl Hansen around it, a gesture that puts timeless design ahead of decorative originality.

Custom-made furniture, one of the project’s central threads

Custom-made furniture is, in fact, one of the project’s central threads, with a strong presence throughout every space. The kitchen, bathrooms, wardrobes, TV unit and dining table are conceived as pieces of integrated architecture. The wardrobes are designed as large-scale volumes combining oak wood with natural-fibre lattice, a reinterpretation of traditional carpentry that brings visual lightness to pieces of considerable presence.

In the bathrooms, the interior designer introduces a chromatic counterpoint. Against a sober backdrop, the new ceramic wall tiles —from the Harmony Lagoon collection— are concentrated in specific areas, adding texture and depth without breaking the overall harmony. In the main bathroom, a lamp custom-designed for the project is clad in the same ceramic as the walls, becoming a detail that condenses the logic of the whole design: each piece refers back to the others.

The relationship with the outdoors is resolved with the same economy of means. The porches and terrace, paved in the same earthy tone, extend the house toward the pool and garden, where the existing palm and lemon trees are preserved as part of the domestic landscape. The outdoor furniture, in natural wood and woven fibres, maintains the material vocabulary of the interior and avoids any break between what is built and what is planted.

The project shows that keeping the original flooring was not a limitation, quite the opposite, the presence of the natural clay has become the guiding thread of a home where interior design, furniture and architecture share the same material origin and the same intent, that of building a home that now feels Mediterranean, without having lost its history.

Materials and furniture

Flooring: clay, existing in the house. Carpentry: Custom-made, in oak wood lacquered in a natural finish. Bathroom tiling: Harmony Lagoon. Taps: Sanycess, gun metal finish. Sofa: Indera. Chairs: Wishbone, by Carl Hansen. Dining table and TV unit: Custom design, Auñón Cabrera studio. Bedroom wardrobe: Custom design in oak and rattan, Auñón Cabrera studio.

Project: Full renovation of a single-family home.
Location: Moraira, Costa Blanca (Alicante).
Surface area: 234 m² (basement 80 m². ground floor 140 m² + porches 50.28 m² + terrace 106.47 m² + pool 36 m². first floor 70 m²).
Interior design: Auñón Cabrera.
Photography: Jonathan Ristagno.
Source: Ana Arnau.

María José Auñón Cabrera

María José Auñón Cabrera is a technical architect and interior designer, founder of the Auñón Cabrera Estudio in Moraira/Teulada, on the Costa Blanca. Her training combines technical architecture and interior design. She studied Technical Architecture at the Universitat Politècnica de València, where she completed a Master’s in Architectural Heritage Conservation, and combined this path with studies in Interior Design at the Escola Superior de Disseny de Valencia. This dual training — technical and design-oriented — has shaped her approach to space from the outset: the attention to detail inherent to the technical discipline, paired with a sensitivity for interior design.

After collaborations with Arquitec and the studio of Pepe Cabrera, where she deepened her expertise in architecture, design, and interior design, she founded her own studio in 2014. This is how Auñón Cabrera Estudio was born, based in Valencia and in Moraira/Teulada (Alicante). Today, twelve years later, the studio has established itself as a multidisciplinary team handling residential, hospitality, office, marine, and cultural projects.

The choice of Moraira/Teulada as a base is no coincidence. The calm and slow living of this stretch of the Mediterranean are, for Auñón Cabrera, a direct reflection of the values she brings to every design. The close relationship with each client — supported by the studio’s independence and the constant presence of its founder — is the foundation of a method that treats interior design as something personal: each space should reflect the identity of the person who inhabits it.

This approach translates into projects where reduction and precision matter more than accumulation: materials, forms, and resources calibrated so that each element sustains the space on its own. Over time, this way of designing has become the studio’s hallmark.

The home enters into dialogue with the original architecture

Renovating a home in a building like this demands, before any design decision, an honest reading of what already exists. Mónica Diago accepted this from the outset. The home was not to compete with the original architecture, but to establish a dialogue with it —to understand it and reinterpret it in a contemporary register.

The intervention begins with a complete reorganisation of the floor plan, with one guiding aim: to bring life towards the light. The daytime zone —living room, dining room and kitchen— shifts towards the façade, opening onto the urban landscape and establishing a direct, continuous relationship with the terrace. What were once independent rooms becomes an open space whose perception changes as you move through it. The interior opens, compresses, opens again. The home is experienced as a sequence, more than as a collection of separate parts.

From the terrace, Madrid unfolds at the foot of the building with a sensation that only height can provide. It is perhaps the most powerful inheritance of Carvajal’s architecture —that capacity of the tower to place its inhabitants above the city and offer an experience that no renovation can invent, only amplify.

Verticality, the key concept of the project

The concept of verticality runs through the entire project. Present in the building’s architecture —in its structure, in the rhythm of its cantilevered balconies, in the upward tension of its entire composition—, it is carried into the interior with coherence. The interior designer conceived floor-to-ceiling timber panelling, large-format porcelain tiles that reinforce visual continuity, and a composition of materials that emphasises height throughout every space.

Against this rigorous geometry, the furniture introduces a necessary counterpoint. Curves appear in the sofas, in the stools, in the coffee tables. An organic language that humanises the spaces and establishes a balance between the force of the architecture and the comfort of the domestic. The tension between the severe verticality of the wall cladding and the gentle roundness of the furniture is one of the project’s most precise achievements.

The materiality works in the same direction. Natural wood, large-format porcelain, glass, mirrors and a palette of warm, restrained tones construct an elegant and serene atmosphere where every material has been chosen for its capacity to age with dignity. Travertine appears on the surfaces of the coffee tables and washbasins, bringing mineral warmth and depth. Oak runs through panels, joinery and furniture, achieving unity across the whole without flattening it. In the kitchen, marble connects the working space to the rest of the home through the generosity of a noble material.

Bespoke furniture designed by the studio

Much of the furniture has been designed by the studio for this project and incorporated into the Diago Home collection, the firm’s own furniture brand. Every piece was conceived to become a natural extension of the space rather than a protagonist object. The wide-curved sofas, the bouclé stools with solid wood bases, the travertine and oak tables with cylindrical legs, the shelving units that also serve as room dividers without closing the space: everything responds to the same logic of integration. Architecture, interiors and furniture speak the same language.

The master bedroom exemplifies this balance well. The headboard is resolved through a floor-to-ceiling timber panel articulated with a grid geometry and textile infills. The bedside table is integrated into the panel as one more element of the composition. A wall light and a sphere pendant address the lighting with the same formal economy. The result is a room that needs no additional decoration, because its interior architecture is already sufficient.

The bathroom follows the same logic: a travertine washbasin carved as a single piece, oak joinery, steel and glass doors that separate the dressing room without interrupting the sense of depth. The mirror multiplies the light. The detail —the matte black taps, the steel profile, the towel folded over the stone edge— appears naturally, because the whole is well resolved.

The lighting, carefully considered in every room, accompanies and acts as a tool for modulation: it emphasises volumes, reveals textures, transforms the perceived scale of the space as the day advances. The home does not look the same in the morning as it does at dusk; that capacity for transformation is one of the project’s most effective resources.

The new and the existing in fertile dialogue

The outcome of all this is a home where the forcefulness of brutalist architecture and the warmth of natural materials do not cancel each other out, but need each other. A project that demonstrates that intervening in a building of such strong character means finding the precise tone that allows the new and the existing to converse without either losing its voice.

More than a renovation, this home is a conversation between two eras: the legacy of a building that Madrid took decades to accept as its own, and a contemporary way of understanding space, light and domestic life. Mónica Diago has succeeded in inhabiting, with warmth and brilliance, the framework that Javier Carvajal built.

Project: Torre de Valencia.
Location: Torre de Valencia, Madrid.
Completed: 2026.
Interior Architecture and Design: Mónica Diago.
Photography and Styling: Paloma Pacheco.
Furniture: Diago Home.
Source: Mónica Diago.

Mónica Diago

A graduate of the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Valladolid, Mónica Diago began her professional career in Madrid at the studio of architect Gregorio Marañón and interior designer Eva Longoria, where she took part in residential and public projects of national and international scale. She later collaborated with landscape architect María Medina on major commissions, including the master plan and landscaping of Abengoa’s Campus Palmas Altas in Seville —a project by Richard Rogers—, the Eastside Gibraltar master plan, and the Ciudad del Motor de Alcañiz competition, both designed by Foster & Partners.

In 2011 she founded Mónica Diago Arquitectura y Diseño, a Madrid-based studio specialising in comprehensive renovations and residential interiors, and launched El Taller de las Cosas Bonitas, a platform devoted to decoration and lifestyle that became a space for creative workshops for companies, children and adults.

In 2021 she co-founded Lumier, a boutique developer focused on the transformation of singular homes in Madrid. Lumier works with a team of architects, interior designers and builders on carefully selected projects, offering a full turnkey service: from the selection of properties in prime locations to design, renovation and final interior fit-out. The strategic use of light defines the identity of its homes —noble materials, bespoke kitchens, sustained attention to detail— with the aim of creating spaces that generate wellbeing and a distinctive character.

More recently, Diago has created Diago Home, a furniture and decoration brand born of her collaboration with local craftspeople. “The DNA of Diago Home grows from the search for a serene, timeless design that is honest with its materials,” the architect explains. Marble, wood and fine textiles are the protagonists of a hand-crafted collection in which the mark of manual work remains visible in every piece. The cabinetmakers, shaped over generations in the knowledge of wood —its grain, its rhythm, its character—; the marble workers who know how to read the geological memory of each surface; the upholsterers from family workshops, passing the precision of their craft from parents to children: all of them are an essential part of the project.

Diago Home is not simply a furniture collection. From its founding, the brand has assumed an explicit commitment to the preservation of artisan trades in Spain. The concern over the lack of generational succession in crafts that form part of the country’s cultural identity has given rise to the Diago Home Scholarship Programme, launched in collaboration with IES León Felipe in Torrejón de Ardoz, through which the firm funds and supports the training of new apprentices in trades such as cabinetmaking, stonemasonry and upholstery. A small gesture, in the architect’s own words, to return to craftsmanship the cultural value it must not lose — and to build the future of design from there.

By integrating the balcony into the living area, the renovation exposed two structural columns that had until then remained hidden within the enclosure. Architect Wittmann chose not to neutralise them, but to clad them in slatted concrete — ripas in Portuguese — turning them into the project’s spatial point of reference. From that gesture, the entire floor plan reorganised itself around them.

A social space organised in layers

The main living area is resolved around an island sofa with reversible backrests as its central piece, oriented toward the tree canopy views of the Jardins neighbourhood. The perimeter wall, clad in American oak from floor to ceiling, integrates doors and openings without interrupting the plane, unifying the reading of the perimeter. Hanging on it is a large-format work by Ronald Lago — organic forms in green, terracotta and beige — that enters into dialogue with the material palette of the whole.

The transition between the main sitting room and the television lounge is managed by a painted oxide-red steel plate shelving unit, which divides from the logic of the membrane. In this space, a modular sofa in pale grey and a travertine stone coffee table occupy one side; on the other, the Tonico armchair by Sérgio Rodrigues in cognac leather and the shelving volume holding the owners’ books, ceramics and artworks.

At the opposite end, beside the second column, a glazed wine cabinet visually defines the threshold into the music area, where a Yamaha grand piano and a hung electric guitar occupy the space with discretion. For the owners, music is a private practice, and the architecture made room for it with the same naturalness as the books or the ceramic pieces.

The dining room and kitchen, open to the outside

The formal dining room opens onto the glazed facade with city views. A circular wooden table with a cylindrical base and oak armchairs organise the space with restraint. The lamp of black rods suspended in a cross formation brings an active geometry to the ceiling that accompanies the scale of the room and marks its gathering point.

The gourmet kitchen, in continuity with the informal dining area, combines the dark stone island with a light wood side table and camel leather chairs. A ceiling-hung planter introduces a vegetal presence into the work area and connects the interior visually with the terraces. The service kitchen, resolved with lacquered fronts and a continuous grey stone worktop, maintains the material coherence of the whole.

The bedrooms, each at its own scale

The master bedroom organises a space of quiet. The moss-green fabric headboard spans the full width of the wall and sets the chromatic tone of the room. Translucent white linen curtains filter the lateral light. Floating oak bedside tables and a wooden bench at the foot of the bed complete a room in which the materials follow the same design logic as the rest of the house.

The children’s bedrooms were designed around autonomy: low beds, accessible shelving and study areas integrated into the furniture define spaces that grow with their occupants. The playroom, with a storage bench-sofa in wood and mixed upholstery, is designed for open and intensive use. The children’s bathrooms feature handcrafted hexagonal tiles in colours chosen by each child.

Throughout the project, concrete, American oak and solid hardwood build a palette that holds its coherence from beginning to end. The slatted concrete columns remain visible in every space and recall the origin of each decision. What at first appeared as a structural constraint became a name, a rhythm and the identity of the whole.

Project: Apartamento Ripas.
Location: Jardim Paulista, São Paulo, Brasil.
Area: 320 m².
Completed: 2025.
Architecture and interiors: RAWI Arquitetura
Architect: Raphael Wittmann.
Team: Giovanna Araújo, Mayara Yamaya, Ulisses Hubner, Wilmar Junior.
Construction: Zabo Engenharia.
Photography: Rafael Renzo.
Source: RAWI Arquitetura.

Raphael Wittmann

Raphael Wittmann trained as an architect at the Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie in São Paulo, where his final degree project centred on the Casa da Música — a choice that already pointed toward an architecture understood as sensory experience rather than image. After graduating in 2009, he extended his training with a postgraduate degree in business administration at FIA-USP, adding a strategic and managerial dimension that today also shapes the way he runs his practice.

His early professional years took him to the Museu da Casa Brasileira in São Paulo, where he coordinated the education team, to Chile for a collaborative architecture book project, and to the curatorial committee of the VI Ibero-American Architecture Biennial — experiences that built a broad perspective, equally attentive to the project and to its cultural and disciplinary context.

In 2013 he founded RAWI Arquitetura + Design in the Jardim Paulistano neighbourhood of São Paulo, where the studio has been based ever since. His practice is rooted in the tradition of São Paulo architectural thought and in the city’s brutalist legacy: an architecture in which the plastic force of structural volumes and the honest expression of materials organise space and produce that play of light and shadow that gives it character and density.

Over more than a decade, RAWI has developed over eighty residential and commercial projects across São Paulo and other Brazilian states, working at different scales — from new-build architecture to interior projects, from furniture design to broader territorial interventions. Concrete, steel, brick, stone, timber and glass are the studio’s habitual materials, handled with directness and without artifice.

Sustainability is part of the design process from the outset: material selection, waste management, photovoltaic energy, rainwater harvesting and natural ventilation are variables the studio integrates as part of a considered position on the relationship between architecture and its environment.

Wittmann understands form as the outcome of a process of listening, reflection and drawing. An architecture that takes shape through use, asserts itself in matter, and endures over time.

The project takes tropical brutalism as its base language. Exposed concrete defines the structure with formal authority: bare columns, carefully considered cantilevers, a massing that unfolds on site with conviction. A planted roof crowns the composition and folds it into the leafy fabric of the neighbourhood. On the ground floor, the façade opens to the garden through large operable planes that place the pool and lawn in direct continuity with the living spaces.

The interior works through a careful accumulation of materials with visible history. The tonal palette — terracotta, fallow, slate — runs through the house with consistency; each room receives the same materials at a different temperature. Oak appears in floors, ceilings and joinery with a warmth that tames the scale of the larger spaces. Concrete, present in the columns and transitional elements, maintains the connection with the exterior architecture and serves as the material anchor of the whole.

A living room open to the tropical garden

The main living room opens directly onto the tropical garden. Set against a mass of tree ferns, the wool bouclé sofa and raw timber trunk table offer a deliberate tactile register — surfaces that invite touch, that gather light and shadow with equal naturalness. Linen curtains in a camel tone manage the lateral opening of the space while preserving, at every moment, the relationship with the garden. The lighting, resolved with cylindrical black projectors recessed into the timber ceiling, accompanies the composition from above with discretion.

The dining room incorporates a large-format textile piece on the main wall. A natural fibre tapestry with linear trajectories that turns the background of the space into a field of active texture. The dark oak table and its accompanying chairs build an atmosphere of contained solidity. A high-backed chair, upholstered in terracotta printed fabric, brings singularity to the composition and reinforces the palette of the whole.

A kitchen with artisanal character

The kitchen chooses toasted oak to clad the floor-to-ceiling cabinet fronts, combined with a worktop and splashback in grey-green stone that introduces a chromatic freshness. The white mortar hood functions as a central sculptural element. Wooden stools with a brass detail complete a workspace that preserves the artisanal character of the whole.

The main bedroom constructs silence with the same attentiveness and care. Two layers of curtains — translucent linen and grey-brown velvet — orchestrate the entry of light with warmth. A circular-geometry rattan chair of generous scale occupies the corner by the window, turning that fragment of the room into a recognisable place of pause. The oak headboard and the concrete volume in the ceiling sustain the continuity of materials throughout the house.

The bathroom incorporates ceramic terracotta tiles, laid vertically, creating a surface texture of great presence. The worktop in rough-cut limestone — with the trace of the process preserved in the raw finish of its edge — is the piece that best distils the intention of the project: the material placed in the precise context that gives it meaning, with all its physical density intact.

Elystan is a house designed to be lived in with ease. Sophistication lies in the accumulated process of decisions — materials, proportions, pieces, scale — and in how those decisions quietly step aside when the inhabitants arrive, making room for life.

Project: Elystan.
Location: Brisbane (Australia).
Completed: 2025.
Interior design: Samantha Leigh Interiors.
Architecture: Tim Stewart Architects.
Styling: Jack Milenkovic.
Landscaping: Wild Studio.
Photography: Dave Wheeler.
Source: Samantha Leigh Interiors.

Samantha Leigh

Samantha Leigh studied interior design at the Enmore Design Centre in Sydney, where she trained between 2011 and 2015. In 2019 she founded her own studio in Brisbane, Samantha Leigh Interiors, through which she works on high-end residential projects, hospitality, and select commercial spaces.

The studio offers a comprehensive service spanning from initial concept to final styling, including bespoke furniture and lighting design. Samantha personally leads each project at the head of a specialist team, ensuring coherent creative direction and rigorous execution across every phase.

The studio’s aesthetic language is defined by each project, building its own narrative from the project’s specific characteristics and the context in which it unfolds. From that narrative foundation, the studio works with materiality and texture to compose spatial volumes with a distinct character, complemented by a selection of pieces — bespoke, collectible, contemporary or vintage — that add depth and singularity to the whole. Close collaboration with craftspeople and rigorous technical documentation are integral to the method that makes those results possible.

Furniture that divides and connects, instead of walls

What elevates this project beyond a functional renovation is the way it resolves the boundaries between spaces. Instead of conventional walls or doors, Idearch proposes filters: pieces of furniture that separate and connect at the same time, with two sides of use and varying degrees of transparency. The kitchen opens onto the living room, but the two-height peninsula works simultaneously as a bar and a breakfast counter, while the upper shelving unit acts as a divider accessible from both sides. In the study, the enclosure is a piece of furniture: a timber and glass front with integrated shelving that also houses the doors leading to the study and the main bedroom. The joinery does the work that partition walls would conventionally do, with greater spatial and functional richness.

The material palette is deliberately concise. The existing metal structure is painted green — the same tone that runs through the kitchen furniture — turning a technical element into the project’s most visible chromatic gesture. Against that dense, matte green, the shelving, worktops and birch plywood work table bring warmth and continuity. The bathroom introduces a second scene: white tiles in the shower, relief terracotta ceramic cladding, and light wood on the vanity unit. Three materials that, in combination, generate a recognisable atmosphere, distinct from the rest of the home.

The result is a home that has gained in openness without losing in character. Light travels the full length of the plan, spaces communicate naturally, and the furniture functions as minor architecture: it organises, filters, stores and gives scale. Casa Espejo is a project that demonstrates that versatility does not require vagueness, and that the opening of a space can be built with the same precision as its enclosure.

Project: Casa Espejo.
Location: Madrid.
Completed: 2023.
Interior design: Idearch Studio.
Team: Syra Abella y Joaquín Mosquera.
Photography: Marta Vidal.
Source: Idearch Studio.

Idearch Studio

Idearch is an architecture studio founded in Madrid in 2009 by Syra Abella and Joaquín Mosquera. Since then it has developed projects across multiple scales and programmes — housing, retail, offices, public spaces — guided by a principle that runs through every commission: to give each built work its own singularity, from simplicity and honesty, attending to the essential values of architecture. Its clients include both private entities and public institutions.

The studio’s trajectory has received national and international recognition. The COAM 2019 Award for new construction, for the Casa-Estudio for an artist in Hoyo de Manzanares, was followed by selections in the Bigmat International Architecture Award 2021, the FAD Awards for Architecture and Interior Design 2021 and the Awards of the Council of Architects of Spain 2022. Competition work has also accumulated numerous prizes and mentions — among them first prize in the competition for the new headquarters of the COEM and a finalist position in the competition for the Central Library of Helsinki, from among 550 proposals. Their work has been published in outlets such as Tectónica, AV, ConArquitectura, Arquitectura Viva, Metalocus and Archello.

Abella and Mosquera regard practice and theory as inseparable parts of the same work. Both have taught at the ETSAM and at the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, have published in specialist journals and books, and take part in university research groups. That dual presence — in the project and in reflection on it — is a constitutive part of the studio’s identity.

Joaquín Mosquera

Joaquín Mosquera holds a doctorate in architecture from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and is a professor of Architectural Design at the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria. Before founding idearch, he was part of the team at Dominique Perrault Architecture, where he served as architect in charge of works on the Caja Mágica Olympic Tennis Centre in Madrid — a large-scale project of singular importance for the city.

Awarded a postgraduate grant by the Fundación Caja Madrid to study at Columbia University in New York, he completed the Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design and the Master in Advanced Architectural Research, rounding out that period with a sustained interest in photography alongside photographers of recognised standing. Back in Madrid, he co-founded idearch with Syra Abella in 2009. His work within the studio spans projects of different scales and typologies, with competition prizes and publications in numerous specialist media. Teaching and research are, for him, natural dimensions of architectural practice.

Syra Abella

Syra Abella graduated in architecture from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid and went on to develop her professional career over eight years at Espegel-Fisac Arquitectos, where she worked as architect in charge of works and projects. That extended and formative period gave her a thorough command of built practice in the field of contemporary architecture and urban planning.

In parallel, she deepened her interests in architectural visualisation and digital representation during a two-year stay in New York — disciplines she incorporated as fundamental tools in her way of working. In 2009 she co-founded idearch with Joaquín Mosquera, a studio from which she has developed architecture and interior design projects across a wide range of scales and programmes, recognised with national and international awards and published across a broad spectrum of specialist media.