A place to cook and spend time with friends

Casa Albero: how to design a 60 m² apartment without sacrificing anything

Transforming a traditional kitchen into an open and social space for enjoying food and company.

There's a question that always arises with small apartments: What do I have to give up?

Casa Albero proposes a different way to start. Not what to remove, but what truly matters. And from there, build everything.

Guillermo Trapiello is an architect and industrial designer. When he renovated his own 60 m² apartment with interior designer Ana Cubas, he didn't make a list of minimal needs. He made a list of what he wanted his life to be like inside that home.

How to design a small apartment around what matters most
Just through the door is the txoko, a kitchen for ten people. That says it all about who lives here.
A txoko is a Basque concept: a space for gathering, cooking, eating, and drinking without haste. In Casa Albero, it’s a long countertop and a continuous table that run from one end of the apartment to the other. It seats ten people. In a 60 m² apartment, that’s a lot of space dedicated to a single thing.
But that’s exactly the decision. For Guillermo, the txoko is the most important space in the house. Everything else was organized around it.
What you decide to prioritize is what your home becomes. In Casa Albero, that priority is clear from the very first step.

Double height, light and continuous flooring: why Casa Albero feels bigger than it is

The image fits perfectly. This apartment can be walked through completely without opening a single door. The continuous flooring travels from the txoko, passes through the library and reaches the living room. Light enters through the outer facade and the inner courtyard, meeting in the center of the apartment. When it falls directly on the floor, the white of the walls is tinged with golds and sands, hence the name: Casa Albero.

The double height of the living room is the perfect solution to make the apartment feel larger without adding square footage. In the kitchen, the wooden beams of the old false ceiling were left exposed. In the bedroom, the space under the eaves was used to create a bunk bed, two superimposed rooms connected by a ladder, a more intimate one below and a guest bedroom above.

Objects, prototypes and the kitchen: Guillermo Trapiello's way of choosing

Everything in Casa Albero was placed by Guillermo because he made it, chose it, or is still thinking about keeping it.

The library is what he himself calls a hodgepodge, books, objects, and lamps, each from a different source. It coexists with his own prototypes: the Gofre table, which is both a low table and a display for collections; and the Gaya lamp, a birdcage converted into a light. Guillermo says that being surrounded by his own pieces helps him to keep refining them. The house is his laboratory.

Guillermo chose each element just as he chose everything else in this house. LAMINATE Marble Green, a soft sage green, for the txoko. Round wooden handles. It's not a safe color. It's a choice made with conviction, that of someone who knows exactly how they want to live.

What a small space needs to feel generous

The question behind Casa Albero is not technical, it's personal: How do I want my life to be in here? From there, every spatial decision has a clear direction.

The kitchen you choose says as much about you as the books you keep or the objects you collect. When you treat it with that same conviction, it stops being a piece of furniture and becomes part of who you are.