Casa EME is an house renovation in Madrid, Spain, by Gon Architects. Designed in 2025, the venture reworks a 108 m² house within the metropolis’s historic core by preserving its current wooden flooring and resetting the plan round each day life. Rooms are reassigned somewhat than erased, giving the house a clearer order whereas protecting its materials reminiscence in place.
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About Casa EME
The story of Casa EME begins with a reminiscence and a need. For Manuel, the proprietor, each arrived earlier than the acquisition, throughout one among many visits to flats in central Madrid, when this one felt unusually acquainted, as if he had already lived in a spot with the identical spirit in one other time.
There was additionally a really particular want. He imagined himself studying there on an peculiar Sunday afternoon, seated on the couch as gentle entered by means of the 5 giant front room home windows and framed views of Plaza Mayor, Calle Toledo, Plaza de Puerta Cerrada, and the Collegiate Church of San Isidro el Actual.
Set inside a nook constructing in Madrid de los Austrias, Casa EME occupies a place like a watchtower in a dense city cloth of Baroque origin, already recorded on Pedro Texeira’s 1646 map and now formed by the bustle and tourism of the up to date historic middle. The unique 108 m² (1,163 sq ft) house confronted totally outward, but its bow-tie geometry didn’t produce a transparent home order.
5 rooms of various sizes, six balconies, and two street-facing home windows have been tied collectively by a steady flooring of stable tropical IPE wooden in a number of tones. It learn nearly like a carpet. The wooden prolonged by means of the entire house aside from the toilet, the place the end shifted to ceramic.
The association of makes use of was poorly resolved. The kitchen, paired with an outsized rest room, was pushed to the again of the house; the bed room was small, removed from the toilet, and entered by means of two doorways, one opening straight from the lounge, which made each rooms troublesome to prepare; and on the middle of the house, the darkest room—additionally probably the most singular due to its trapezoidal form—remained an empty circulation space and not using a outlined position.
That missed alternative turns into the start line for the intervention. The proposal is constructed on a strict premise: to protect the prevailing wood flooring in its entirety, not merely as a floor end however as a fabric reminiscence that anchors the house to a spot and a time.
The ground stays precisely the place it’s. It retains the marks of repeated use and the slight instability that point offers to issues. Working from that situation, the venture maintains the system of rooms from the earlier format and shifts this system throughout the plan like sliding items, creating a brand new order and a clearer studying of home life.
One of the crucial vital adjustments hyperlinks the bed room on to the toilet. Inside, the toilet remembers an outside panorama by means of greens in diversified tones. The connection is made by means of a closed cloud-green pass-through quantity that helps versatile use and incorporates clothes storage.
Each rooms are tied collectively by means of the footprint of the previous rest room. Relatively than conceal that hint, the venture leaves it seen in ceramic, making time legible and protecting the home’s reminiscence current throughout the new association.
The kitchen strikes to the middle of the house. It turns into the social core and the gathering level when mates come collectively to eat Manuel’s specialty, beef ragu lasagna. On the entrance—the narrowest and most fragile a part of the plan, only one meter vast and positioned between the private and non-private elements of the house—the ceiling is lowered and marked in yellow to redefine the brink.
One other exact transfer adjustments the lounge relationship. One of many former doorways is eliminated, turning an adjoining room into an unnamed and versatile space that may serve for examine or for visitors with out interrupting each day routines.
Every room is formed by furnishings made for a selected position. Some items are built-in as steady floor-to-ceiling storage, whereas others belong to a broader system of objects that provides every room its character. On the far aspect of an electric-blue column clad in a zigzag-textured materials that echoes the geometry of the house and improves acoustic efficiency, the living-dining room is organized as a unfastened panorama of objects: couch, desk, lamp, shelving, tv.
Nothing is mounted right into a inflexible hierarchy. The elimination of corridors produces a brand new home topography, the place trapezoidal and irregular rooms join organically somewhat than by means of leftover passage.
Transitions between rooms happen with out doorways. As an alternative, thresholds are outlined by coloration and texture. Wooden, steel, cloth, aluminum, ceramic, and resin sit alongside a vivid chromatic vary—crimson, blue, yellow, white, and inexperienced—forming a refined layer of home data that reaches past the visible and formal towards contact and scent.
Casa EME displays on performing with intention somewhat than extra. It chooses preservation over demolition and reuse earlier than new development. What emerges is a house by which motion by means of the house passes continually by means of paired circumstances—private and non-private, compressed and expanded, open and closed—reactivating a home that, in some ways, was already there.
Images by imagensubliminal
Go to Gon Architects
– by Matt Watts
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