Reform P-651 / SUAV + Carmen Ana de Miguel

Reform P-651 / SUAV + Carmen Ana de Miguel

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Text description provided by the architects. This comprehensive reform project arises from an investigation on how to make contemporary housing more flexible from a gender perspective and from emotional design. The three-small-bedroom house of the ’60s located in the emblematic neighborhood of Lavapies in Madrid did not adapt to the way of life of its new inhabitant.

Life as performance. The project arises from the search for a flexible spatiality that could generate scenarios of changing acts in relation to the hobbies of its new owner: painting workshop, study, cinema, or tastings for fifteen people. The fundamental piece of the house is two intertwined cubes – containers for the wet areas – which in turn solve all the installations of the house. The importance of color is very present as it is a home – exhibition space. Inspired by the atmosphere in Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas movie; the image acts as a mediator of an imminent but at the same time unattainable truth.

The new program aims to link the social areas of the kitchen to the living space, making cooking functions more flexible and making it public; always seeking to break the roles that assign activities and predefined spaces.  The bathrooms are fragmented as in French or Japanese homes, detaching the toilet as a private space; now bathed in color. The bathroom, in turn, becomes a laundry, housing the cycle of the shower – bathtub – dirty clothes and clean clothes, making everyone part of the process.

Nectar Juice + Acqua Blue + Indian Yellow are the main colors used to develop processes and harbor actions. The rest of the house is a neutral container equipped and compact. The Meli Pine floor is the only trace of the original house, whose outline reveals the original layout of the house.

The commissioning starts from that architectural thinking of the Smithsons, of giving an answer to the necessity to control, from the beginning in an orderly manner, all the objects and belongings that daily existence entails, together with the idea of ​​achieving a clear habitable space.

Both the mobile desk table and the triple corrugated glass and wrought iron door that make the room independent, or the floating paintings in the exhibition lanes, generate changing spaces that zone the main space.