Formerly dark and insular, this 646-square-foot Madrid apartment has been reimagined as a luminous, refined interior with quietly Parisian notes. Located in the capital’s Justicia neighborhood—arguably the city center—architect Ángela Bermúdez helped the owners of this home as they were looking for a property to purchase.
“The apartment wasn't appealing, but it had potential,” she says. “There were six rooms all off of a long, dark hallway. They had very low ceilings and looked like they hadn’t been updated since the 1980s.” But many apartments in Madrid present a similar challenge—they are divided into many small rooms, a stylistic choice that was popular in the 1970s and ‘80s in Spain.
“With many of them you can’t change the layout because the internal walls are also load-bearing ones,” Bermúdez explains. Though this apartment had a welcome surprise—nearly all of the internal partitions could be removed leaving a blank slate upon which Bermúdez could create an ideal home.
The owners, a young couple eager to enjoy life in the heart of Madrid, were excited for Bermúdez to get to work. Their only requirement? “A home that feels sophisticated despite its small size,” Bermúdez outlines. In just four months, the architect’s renovation exceeded the couple’s expectations.
The home was reimagined as a single space with as few divisions as possible. Bermúdez created a large common space that includes the living area, kitchen, and dining room. Only the separation between the daytime and sleeping areas is clearly defined. “We wanted a space where you could cook, work, and hang out with friends,” she says. “Something that feels very dynamic even if it is small, with a number of different functions all concentrated there.”
One of the apartment’s pre-renovation pluses is that all of the windows open onto balconies. Thus, each room had the potential to harness an open quality. The redesign sought for light to reach every corner of the home, filling the apartment with light and “creating a feeling of spaciousness,” adds Bermúdez.
Oak paneling serves as a common thread uniting the different parts of the home, from the entry to the kitchen. Muted checkerboard flooring is repeated throughout the house, too. “A sense of continuity,” says Bermúdez, was crucial in restoring the home to its former glory; the architect wanted its interior facets to recall the building's original historic details (the unit was built in 1910.) In pursuit of that goal, she also added plaster moldings to the ceilings and walls of the living area. Together with large mirrors, they emphasize the heights of the ceilings and, rather than overloading the small space, they serve to detail every square inch.
In the sleeping area, the bathroom—the only one in the house—needed to be separated from the principal bedroom in a creative way, such that visitors could use it without walking by the couple’s snoozing quarters. “We incorporated sliding floor-to-ceiling wooden doors on one side,” says Bermúdez of her chosen solution. “When they’re open, the bathroom becomes part of the bedroom.” This is but one example in this project that shows demonstrates how even in small spaces—when an architect is willing to take risks—the results are original and unexpected design solutions.
This Madrid apartment was originally published in AD Spain.
