Oak, Concrete and a Growing Family

How Alba, an architect, recovered what three decades of bad decisions had buried.

The first time Alba visited the apartment, it was dark. Compartmentalized. Confusing. There were panels on the walls, doors that divided every corner, an enclosed terrace that was no longer a terrace. The building, constructed in 1979 by Luis Alfonso Pagán, a disciple of the same school as Torres Blancas, had a clear architectural identity on the exterior. Inside, almost nothing of it remained.

Alba didn't see a problem. She saw a guide.

The building already held the answer. Before deciding what to add, one had to understand what had been removed.

The renovation started there: removing everything that should never have been there. The partitions that could disappear, disappeared. The terrace was recovered, the light returned. And with it, the original spatial logic of the project.
It wasn't a transformation. It was a recovery.
"The building has a very distinctive exterior language. What we did was restore that language on the inside."
The materials palette followed the same logic. Oak, exposed concrete, the colors present on the facade: everything chosen for the interior was already, in some way, on the exterior. The project didn't invent an aesthetic direction. It found one.

Designed for today. Conceived for ten years from now.

There are three of them: Alba, her husband, and their three-year-old son. An active, creative family who cooks, entertains, and needs their home to function for both work and life, without having to choose.

But Alba didn't design for that specific moment. She designed for the moments yet to come.

The third bedroom has sliding doors that define it when needed and integrate it into the common area when not. By day, it's an office. At night, or when guests are over, it disappears as such and the space expands. The hallway was converted into storage so as not to waste a single meter. The kitchen island is sized so that a three-year-old child can reach it now, and so that an entire family can gather around it ten years from now.

"We were looking for a home that we could mold to our lifestyle, but that would allow for change or adaptation in the future."

In residential design, such flexibility is rarely achieved without sacrificing something. Here, nothing was sacrificed. Every decision has at least two possible interpretations, and both work.

A single language, each room distinct

The kitchen is in WOOD Roble. The bathrooms in LACA Pino. The cabinets combine LACA Blanco with WOOD Roble. Three spaces, three very distinct material choices. And yet, the house reads as a single entity.

What unifies everything is not the same finish. It is the same design language.

The same rounded handle on every door. The same clean lines. The same restraint in every detail.

"The kitchen became the heart of the home. We needed it to integrate into the common area as just another piece of furniture, without losing functionality."

A well-made house is not a house where everything matches. It is a house where everything stems from the same idea.

There are projects that demonstrate what an architect knows how to do. And there are projects that demonstrate that they understand how life is lived. This is one of the latter.

Alba didn't design a catalog house. She designed her own. With the marks of time that were already there, with the furniture she already had, with the needs of a family that is still growing.