Living Small in the Heart of Madrid
“Everything was in the wrong place”, Gonzalo Pardo, architect and creative director at gon architects, told Never Too Small of the 42sqm/452sqft apartment they were recently asked to redesign. The kitchen was in the entrance, the bedroom was shared with the living room, and there just wasn’t enough natural light. Its owner, Roberto, had been living in this top-floor unit of a historical building in the heart of Madrid for nearly three years when he enlisted the gon architects team to help him make it work better for him.
Logic was one of the first tools they turned to when reformatting the layout, which saw the residence reorganised into two key zones, one public and the other private. A sleeping area and shower are now sectioned off where the bathroom once was, while the kitchen has been moved further into the main room so that it coexists with the living and dining space. A little partition wall with a study desk was added to help zone the space a bit and a “hidden” box was added to hold the toilet.
Colour Theory
Colour plays a huge role in this design. Wes Anderson was one of their main inspirations, after all. (And you can’t do Anderson without some colour.) Pardo explained how they introduced different colours and assigned each with a unique function in order to create “different kinds of ambiances and zones inside such a small space”. The entrance, for example, is blue territory, with a deep hue lining the corridor’s walls and ceiling to guide the eye right into the home. Stepping into the home, Pardo’s colour theory is validated by the little pops of colour carefully distributed throughout.
The green zone – also the casual home office – consists of a triangular desk jutting out from a partition wall that creates some movement and separation from the rest of the living area, which is the main hub of the home. This space manages to strike a balance between feeling open and expansive as well as intimate and self-contained. An angled mirror at the end of the butter yellow kitchen joinery defines the limits of the space, while reflecting it back on itself to make it feel like it extends all the way to the bedroom wall. A large, 5.5-metre-long kitchen is fully equipped to match Roberto’s love of cooking, while a little chair under a dormer window is the perfect match for his love of reading.
To the opposite end of the home, behind a pocket door and some glass brick tiles, is the all-white bedroom and shower. It is one of Pardo’s favourite areas of the home because of the three skylights, one of which was added during the renovation to offer a view of the famous Carrión Building (known for its big Schweppes logo). A spacious tiled shower – made even larger by the mirror – sits at the edge of the bedroom adjacent to the glass bricks. In the evening, it can be used as a lantern of sorts for the rest of the space because of the nice warm glow it creates.
Retrofitted for the Future
casa flix shows in full colour the rewards of retrofitting historical and awkward spaces into something contemporary, practical, and long lasting. Pardo explains: “It's important we’re reusing the historical houses in the city centres, but it's also important to make them liveable: to design them with natural light, natural ventilation, and with materials that you know are going to last for a long, long time”. He reminds us of the important reality that making a design look nice is only one piece of the puzzle, the other is making it truly usable, both day-to-day and in the long term. So while our eyes might be immediately drawn to the fun pops of colour throughout, we should remember to linger over the simple things like the white cabinets, converting the entire lower corner of the living room into deep storage “For us, storage in a house is essential”, said Pardo, continuing, “if the storage works, the house will work”.
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