“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.”

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.

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.

Two centuries-old houses reunited

Among these houses in Vulpellac there is one that brings together, under a single roof, two different eras: a fourteenth-century construction and a seventeenth-century extension, merged into a single two-storey home listed as national heritage. When the interior designer Clara Lleal received the commission for its restoration, the house had lost much of its character under layers of unrelated interventions, strident colour combinations, mismatched materials, a coherence diluted by the years. The purpose of the project, is summed up in the name the studio gave it: Recovering the calm.

Stone, lime and memory

The intervention began with what could not be seen. The walls of the ground floor carried rising damp aggravated by cement renders that prevented their natural transpiration; removing them and replacing them with lime stuccoes restored to the building one of its oldest functions, that of breathing. In that same process a window appeared, bricked up since the time when part of the house functioned as the village grocery store, its recovery not only restores the original reading of the façade, it also lets light return in depth to spaces that had gone decades without it.

On that basis, the interior designer unified the house with a continuous stone-toned microcement floor, extended across both storeys, staircase and bathrooms, as a gesture that erases the seams between the old and the added. The new staircase was designed as a sequence of monochromatic planes that integrates into the whole; a single Il Fanale lamp, placed at floor level, is enough to give it a sculptural presence.

A house to inhabit slowly

The ground floor brings together the daytime spaces around a patio with a porch, while the upper floor houses an open study and three bedrooms. From the entrance, a wide hallway organises the circulation towards the different spaces.

In the living room, the low height of the vaulted ceiling led to ruling out any technical lighting in favour of an indirect, intimate light; an antique chair, restored while respecting the original tone of its wood, converses with a Vibia lamp in a contrast between the old and the contemporary that repeats throughout the house. The kitchen gained surface area by removing a partition wall that hid two panels of exposed stone, and is organised around an antique cast-iron cooking range; the table, chairs and lamps are pieces sourced in France. Outside, the patio recovered the original tone of the exposed brick of its vault after removing years of climbing plants that were overloading the walls.

Quiet, timeless spaces on the upper floor

Upstairs, the study brings together an antique table and chair with a work by Carla Tarruella that integrates into the general atmosphere of the space. The three bedrooms continue the same discourse of neutrality and sobriety. In the main suite, a large pencil drawing by Marcos Isamat lends depth through the subtlety of its lines; the second bedroom is furnished with vintage pieces from Casa Azul Bisbal and DCW Éditions lamps; the third preserves a medieval window, for which a light timber frame was designed that leaves historic architecture as the sole protagonist. The bathrooms follow the same formal refinement, with built-in white furniture, marble countertop washbasins and classically inspired mirrors.

The decisive role of August, the owner

The involvement of August, owner of the house and co-author in practice of a project that is also his own, has been decisive. His was the unhurried search through antique dealers and vintage shops in Catalonia and France —among them Casa Azul Bisbal and Espacio Noguera— to find each piece of furniture, and his the judgement with which, after touring galleries, he chose the works of art for the different spaces. The result is an essential house, with a palette reduced to whites, off-whites and natural wood, in which every object has a reason to be there and in which the absence of artifice becomes the true luxury.

More than a renovation, the project is a reconciliation with the history of the place, one that silences the noise accumulated over decades so that a centuries-old architecture can breathe again as it deserves. Between centuries-old walls of stone, lime and natural light, this house in Vulpellac recovers the calm it treasured for so many years, the same calm that can be breathed in the streets of the whole town.

Project: Recuperar la calma.
Location: Vulpellac, Baix Empordà.
Autoría: Clara Lleal Interiorista y August Mabilon.
Photography: Maria Pujol.
Furniture: Casa Azul Bisbal y Espacio Noguera, tiendas vintage.
Rugs: Zara Home.
Lighting: Nemo, Vibia, Il Fanale, Lyte, DCW Éditions, Louis Poulsen, Santa & Cole, Karman.
Art: Carla Tarruella, Marcos Isamat.
Fittings: Fontini, Font Barcelona.
Source: Clara Lleal.

Clara Lleal

Clara Lleal trained as an interior designer at the Escola Massana in Barcelona, and has since worked with the conviction that interior spaces shape the way we live, which is why they deserve the same care as any other important decision in life.

Her career begins in the late nineties designing shop windows for the major bookstores of the RBA/Edipresse group, and takes definitive shape in the year 2000, when she co-founds the Cm2 Disseny studio in Barcelona, where for two decades she develops residential and contract projects. Between 2003 and 2015 she also takes on the Spanish distribution of the Italian furniture firm FIAPP International. That journey, made up of very different projects, ends up settling into a criterion of her own, a natural and warm interior design, of simple lines and durable materials, in which Nordic influence coexists with the Mediterranean roots of Catalonia, where she lives and works.

In 2019 that criterion finds a home of its own. Lleal founds her studio in Badalona, Clara Lleal Interiorista, of which she is creative director, and from which she carries out residential and commercial interior architecture projects. “Living better through design” sums up, in her own words, what she pursues in every project. We spend most of our lives in interior spaces, so these should inspire us and make us feel good.

A painter and ceramicist in her free time, Lleal brings that craft sensibility to her projects, where handmade, one-of-a-kind pieces are never lacking. That same eye, attentive to craftsmanship and to what is made by hand, has taken her work beyond the studio, her projects have been published in trend blogs, magazines and books in more than forty countries, and she has served on international interior design juries.

The most visible recognition of this stage came with Casa Galería de Arte, distinguished in 2023 with the Best of the Best award at the Architecture MasterPrize (Los Angeles) and a Special Mention at the German Design Award (Frankfurt), after already having received in 2022 the Overall Winner award at the SBID International Design Awards (London), having been a finalist at the IDA International Design Awards, and having been named Project of the Year by the Italian portal Archilovers.

That same residential fabric, built for a growing city, is today one of the neighbourhoods where old and new coexist. The municipal market, dating from 1957, still sets the rhythm of everyday life, while design studios, galleries and an increasingly established creative scene occupy premises that once housed something else. It is within that balance —between built memory and contemporary uses— that Diego Serrulla places one of his latest renovations, a home that had lost much of its character under successive layers of partition walls, and which the project recovers through an element it turns into the protagonist: the hydraulic mosaic floor.

The hydraulic mosaic, restored piece by piece

Before the intervention, the home followed a logic of excessive compartmentalisation: small rooms, limited natural light, a fragmented layout that made it impossible to read the space as a whole. Beneath that distribution, however, an original hydraulic mosaic remained —a hexagonal pattern in grey cement with pieces in beige and green tones— damaged in places but still recognisable. The project takes this as its starting point, less as a decorative find than as the argument that organises the entire renovation.

“I’m interested in a renovation that doesn’t erase a house’s history, but makes it legible,” explains Diego Serrulla. “In this project, the hydraulic mosaic wasn’t a finish, it was a narrative structure. Recovering it piece by piece was an architectural decision, not a decorative one. From there, it was all about ordering the space and opening it up so light could travel through the home, adjusting proportions, aligning heights, integrating the technical systems and getting materials like wood, brick and stone to speak in the same tone.”

Restoring the mosaic floor called for craft work: sourcing compatible pieces from demolition yards, completing them and resetting them by hand until the original pattern was rebuilt. Once reconstructed, that floor becomes the reference point for the rest of the project’s decisions, the placement of the furniture, the proportion of the openings and the relationship between rooms.

Openness and visual depth

On that basis, the renovation removes the partitions that fragmented the daytime area and joins the entrance hall, living room and kitchen into a single continuous sequence. The opening generates visual depth and lets light from the interior courtyard travel through the home from end to end. In the living room, the interior brick façade —cleaned and protected in situ— is kept as a warm counterpoint to the more neutral surfaces in the rest of the house.

The kitchen resolves an irregular geometry with a precise composition of volumes. A vertical module concentrates storage and appliances, while two complementary pieces —a low one in walnut veneer, dedicated to worktop space, and a taller one lacquered in white, lighter in feel, for crockery and utensils— order the rest of the space. At the back, an area with plants next to the courtyard adds depth and reinforces the entry of natural light.

The night-time area follows the same principle of continuity. Two rooms are unified into a single, larger main bedroom, with a central dressing room that organises storage and everyday circulation without the need for new partitions. The bathroom is hidden behind a sliding mirrored door that visually enlarges the space, and the laundry is built into a flush door that doesn’t interrupt the reading of the whole.

Coherence in the combination of materials

The materials are combined with the same criterion of coherence. The new joinery respects the original lines, the internal doors are restored and the air conditioning is resolved with linear diffusers integrated into the architecture, without interfering with the clean image of the space. Mouldings and finishes are kept unbroken, reinforcing a serene atmosphere that runs through the whole house.

More than a renovation, this project sets out a way of intervening in an existing home in which material memory, spatial logic and architectural design work hand in hand. The result is a house that is brighter, more coherent and, above all, more liveable. A home that preserves its essence and projects it into the present, mosaic by mosaic.

Project: Habitar el mosaico.
Typology: Reforma integral de vivienda y diseño interior.
Location: Ensanche de Ruzafa. Valencia.
Completed: 2025.
Architecture and design: Diego Serrulla.
Photography: Germán Cabo.
Source: Lelien. María Lapiedra.

Diego Serrulla

Diego Serrulla trained at the CEU Cardenal Herrera University, where he completed his degree in Architecture. His first years of professional practice took place at the studio of Ángel Abad Melis, a formative period that allowed him to approach the discipline through built work. In 2016 he co-founded Imago tallerarquitectura, a Valencia-based practice where he developed building and renovation projects for five years and consolidated a working method of his own, attentive both to formal coherence and to the technical resolution of each commission.

In 2021 he founded Diego Serrulla Arquitectura in Valencia. The studio was born with the intention of carrying each project through its entire process, from initial concept to final delivery, and built its own construction and development structure to do so. This integration allows every decision — of design, of execution, of timeline — to be accompanied without ceding control of the process to outside parties, and places the studio in a distinctive position within the Valencian scene: that of an architecture practice equally equipped to manage the development and construction of its own projects.

The work of Diego Serrulla Arquitectura spans residential renovations, new-build projects and its own real estate developments, alongside smaller-scale commissions such as product design or exhibition stands. Each project is developed together with the client, with a small, trusted team that allows every decision the attention it requires. The studio also works with a network of local craftspeople, a relationship that brings quality of execution and character to the spaces it builds.

With a human-scale structure, Diego Serrulla Arquitectura understands architecture as a discipline that balances functionality and aesthetics, and seeks in every commission a technical rigor that translates into spaces that are honest, coherent and built to last. Closeness, transparency and reliability define the way the studio works with those who place their trust in it.

The system dissolved over the course of the twentieth century, with the mechanization of farming and rural exodus, but the houses remained standing. Today, much of that minor heritage is being renovated for new uses — in many cases as rural tourism accommodation, or as family housing, like this former casa de masovers in Solius, in the Baix Empordà, whose full renovation is signed by A! Emotional living & work and estudioDOM.

The commission came from a family seeking to enjoy the Mediterranean character of l’Empordà with a lifestyle turned toward the outdoors. The project recovers the 250 m² built across two floors and adds two newly built outdoor spaces — a pergola and a summer dining area — following the owners’ wishes.

Mediterranean blue, the connecting thread

Against the white and light wood that dominate the rest of the house, a single shade of Mediterranean blue runs through the whole home. It is the color of the interior joinery, doors and windows, and also of the facade shutters. This color acts as a standout element that unifies old and new under a single criterion.

An open space for the day area

On the ground floor, the day area is resolved as an open, continuous space. The kitchen, in white with exposed joinery in the same blue as the shutters, is organized around a peninsula that acts as a transition toward the dining room and adds a breakfast area. Hydraulic tile, suspended brass lamps, and a wooden display cabinet with glass doors give character to a space designed for everyday use.

The dining room, next to the kitchen, revolves around a round solid-wood table. A vertical-slat divider separates it visually from the living room without interrupting the light between the two rooms. In the living room, the white-framed fireplace and an aged paneled mirror concentrate the life of the house in the cold months; a second slat divider, independent from the one in the dining room, serves as a backrest for the sofa and dialogues with the custom joinery of the shelving. A space designed both for summer evenings facing the garden and for winter days by the fire.

Main bedroom open to the garden

On the sleeping floor, the main bedroom opens onto the garden through two large blue windows. The atmosphere is built with a few well-chosen elements —a tufted upholstered headboard, a chest of drawers with rustic lines, a valet stand— set against walls in neutral tones and textiles in blue-green, in a space that deliberately renounces accumulation.

The outdoor garden, with the new pergola as protagonist of the renovation

If something sets this project apart, it is that much of its brief was resolved outside the existing walls. The centerpiece is a wooden pergola built to measure for the space, raised on a deck and enclosed on its perimeter with lattice screens, with views over the Empordà landscape, a space designed to prolong summer sobremesas in the shade of the pines. Next to it, a porch already existing in the house has been transformed into a summer dining area, with a wooden kitchen and a masonry barbecue clad in exposed brick, and a large dining table.

That commitment to the outdoors is the logical continuation of the spirit of the original house, an agricultural structure always conceived in direct relation to the land surrounding it. The casa de masovers in Solius no longer works the land, but it still organizes itself around it, and in that —more than in the stone or the tile it retains— lies its continuity with the history the building preserves.

Project: Full renovation, Casa de masovers.
Location: Solius, Baix Empordà (Girona).
Scope: Full interior design of the home + design and construction of new pergola and barbecue area.
Surface area: 250 m² across two floors.
Completed: 2026.
Interior design and creative direction: A! Emotional living & work y estudioDOM — Araceli Usón y Varvara Shabardina.
Photography: Estella Rotger Marti.
Styling: Sol Van Dorssen.
Source: Boutique de Comunicación.

Araceli Usón. A! Emotional living&work

Araceli Usón trained as an interior designer at the Escuela Internacional de Diseñadores Interioristas y Arte de Catalunya (DIAC-EIADE), graduating in 1989. Even before completing her studies, she was already at work on projects at Estudio DSAN in Barcelona, alongside Estrella Salietti and Mª José Ankli. That first stage was followed by more than two decades — from 1989 to 2011 — at AM Asociados, developing renovation, full-scope residential, retail, and hospitality projects: the years in which she built much of the judgment that defines her work today.

In 2012 she founded her own studio in Sant Cugat del Vallès, A! Emotional living & work. There she develops residential and professional projects with a single aim: that functionality and beauty coexist without hierarchy, and that every element of a space speak to the whole. The result is interiors built with noble materials, soft palettes, and sustained attention to texture, conceived to endure beyond the moment’s trends. Her portfolio includes residential renovations in the Barcelona neighborhoods of Sagrada Família, Tres Torres, and Gran Via, and commercial spaces such as the Marc Cain stores and the headquarters of COGAC (Col·legi Oficial de Gestors Administratius de Catalunya).

In 2014 she founded estudioDOM together with Elisabet Sanuy and Varvara Shabardina, partners with whom she brings more than thirty years of combined experience. The studio develops comprehensive residential interior design projects, from concept through to turnkey delivery, with a client list that includes international owners of homes in Barcelona and the Costa Brava.

The method, in both studios, is the same: listen before proposing. Every project begins with a dialogue with the client, in which needs, personalities, and ways of living or working are translated into concrete spatial solutions, supported by a multidisciplinary team — interior designers, architects, construction specialists — that carries the process through from start to finish. Usón sums up this working ethic in three words: honesty, rigor, and innovation.

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.

Subtracting rather than adding

The project sets out from a goal unusual in the renovation of a historic home: subtracting rather than adding. Across the apartment’s 280 square metres, divided between the ground floor and an upper floor reached by a private lift, the studio strips the spaces of the layers time had superimposed on the original house, letting the height, the light and the building’s own structure speak again, in creative dialogue with its memory.

Flexible architecture

Arrival on the upper floor anticipates that way of proceeding. A custom-made wardrobe, lacquered white and finished in mirror, directs the gaze towards the living room and kitchen through a succession of framings that multiply the apartment’s depth. The old openings between load-bearing walls are now framed in Verde Guatemala marble, and incorporate large bronzed glass doors. Depending on whether they are open or closed, the entrance, living room and kitchen function as a single continuous space or as independent rooms. This is an architecture that declares itself flexible without the need for partitions.

The flooring follows the same criterion. White terrazzo replaces an original floor that damp and time had damaged beyond repair, which makes it possible to install an invisible underfloor heating system. On that continuous base, two different terrazzo pieces —for the seating area and the dining area— trace geometric motifs that recall traditional Italian flooring, in aquamarine green, forest green and wheat yellow, a gesture that recovers, through other means, something of the craftsmanship these houses once had.

The living room is organised around a custom-designed oak boiserie, with grain that changes direction on each panel, and a lightened low unit beneath slim bronzed metal shelves. Facing it, an ochre-toned sofa and a terracotta armchair set the mood with a warm palette that the Nabila lamp by Corrado Dotti, hung at just the right height, underlines. The kitchen extends that language with a linear oak composition, a worktop and splashback in the same green marble as the frames, and upper cabinets in fluted glass that visually lighten the volume of the units. Sliding doors allow it to be fully closed off or joined to the living room, and the whole opens onto a terrace over the garden that in summer functions as an extension of the interior.

A more intimate night zone

Changing floors changes the material and the atmosphere of the spaces. Oak parquet laid in Italian herringbone replaces the terrazzo and announces a more intimate night zone. The first room, beneath a powder-coloured vault, works as a night living room and children’s play area, a hinge space resolved, custom-made, with the same logic as the rest of the house. The main bedroom is announced by an oak-clad vestibule that leads to the en-suite bathroom, where a vertical fluted glass filters natural light into the interior and, towards the bedroom, becomes part of a boiserie of mirrored, powder-coloured panels. The children’s room closes the route beneath two vaults painted a soft green, echoing directly the green that opens the house at the entrance.

The building’s age, the argument for the intervention

That use of colour as a connecting thread —green at the entrance, ochres and terracottas in the day zone, powder tones in the night zone— is perhaps the project’s most eloquent decision. In-Nova Studio does not restore the apartment as one would preserve a museum piece, nor does it erase it to start from zero; it inhabits it anew, letting the building’s memory —its height, its vaults, its load-bearing walls— set the rules, and letting colour and contemporary furniture respond to them. The result is a house that turns its age into the argument of the intervention carried out by the architects who restored it.

Furniture and Lighting

Furniture: Kartell Undique Mas side table by Patricia Urquiola, Kartell Cara armchair by Philippe Starck, Kartell Green-a floor lamp, Kartell All Saints mirror, Kartell Shanghai vase, Kartell Ai chairs, Miniforms Barry table, Miniforms Lillotable, Miniforms Claretta chairs, Xartedesign Plugin sofa, Novamobili Fjord sideboard, Westwing Calary console, Movi sliding doors, Cesar Intarsio kitchen, Calia Italia Daisy sofa and pouf, Twils bed, Westwing Corin bedroom rug, Pols Potten vases, Kave Home Maurina outdoor table and chairs.

Lighting: Tooy Nabila, FontanaArte Pangen, Flos Taccia and Bellhop, Davide Groppi Moon, &Tradition Formakami, Westwing Luoma.

Project: Elia’s Home.
Location: Aversa (CE), Italia.
Type: Reforma de vivienda.
Area: 280 m².
Completed: 2026.
Interior Architecture: In-Nova Studio.
Photography: Carlo Oriente.
Contractor: D.edil.
Carpentry: Barra Falegnami.
Supplies: Esagono.
Parquet: Italparchetti.
Terrazzo: Mipa Design.
Source: In-Nova Studio.

In-Nova Studio

In-Nova Studio was born in 2016 in the heart of Naples, beside the monumental complex of Santa Maria la Nova, from the meeting of three young architects: Marcello Ferrara, Martina Russo and Riccardo Teo. Trained and seasoned in international practices, they decide to return to their city to respond, from there, to the questions contemporary society poses to the architect.

Over the years, the studio grows through private commissions published in magazines such as AD, The Plan and Platform, and is recognised with international awards: the 2018 edition of Ecoluoghi, the NIB 2018 Award —among the ten best Italian studios under 36—, the Big See Interior Design Award 2019, its inclusion among the 50 best studios in Italy under 40 according to Platform in 2020, and the Special Mention at the Inarch 2023 Award.

In-Nova Studio pursues a solution of its own for every project: it experiments with materials and technologies, and attends both to the resources of the territory and to the needs of each client. Its work spans interior design, restoration and architectural and urban projects, from a critical, multidisciplinary outlook that understands architecture as a responsibility: sustainable, attentive to the environment, to public space and to historical context, capable of shaping dynamic, shifting spaces to meet the challenges of the future.

Marcello Ferrara

He trains at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, where he earns his Laurea Magistrale in Architecture and Building Engineering (2006-2012, final mark 108), and completes his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Lyon. He builds his early professional career in Paris, at practices such as Architecture-Studio, Reset Studio, H2O Architectes and 2Portzamparc Architectes. In 2016 he returns to Naples and founds In-Nova Studio, together with his two partners.

Martina Russo

She trains at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, where she earns her Laurea Magistrale in Architecture (2006-2014) with a thesis on a technical training centre for raw earth construction in Marrakech. She begins her professional career in Paris, at the practices Loci Anima and TVAA — Thierry Van de Wyngaert, and continues it as an independent professional in Naples. In 2016 she founds In-Nova Studio, together with her two partners.

Riccardo Teo

He trains at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, where he earns his Laurea Magistrale in Architecture (2007-2013). He works as an architect at Archea Associati. In 2016 he founds In-Nova Studio, together with his two partners.