Wooden Frame Flat. Apartment in Barrio de Salamanca, Madrid, Spain | 2022, Ignacio Hornillos, Spain

Architects: Ignacio Hornillos
Design team: José Rueda and Nacho Villalba
Client: Almudena
Photographer: José Hevia

The house, located in the Salamanca neighborhood of Madrid, responds to the vital needs of the client. The new owner, linked to the Mediterranean culture, acquired an apartment that had been recently renovated in the room area. The project seeks to respect what is useful, contain spending, clean up common areas, and generate a new identity with an “Ibicenco” air.
The original concrete structure is hidden, and a new order is born that organizes the house and distributes the facilities. The physical laws remain geometric, but they are transformed in a material, functional, and iconic way. The main strategy consists of opening the interior areas of the house to the outside, generating a space visually connected by any of the two entrances that the apartment has.

The kitchen, previously closed and compartmentalized, ceases to be a server space and becomes the protagonist through a pure and material formalization. Its position, as a box that articulates the new floor, makes it both a transit area and a space that connects the entire house. The oak wood carpentry, understood as passage thresholds and useful boxes, is capable of hiding the technical and physiological needs necessary to configure a new structured and warm inhabited space.

The house is homogenized through the creation of a monochrome space with lime mortar and mortex finishes. Almudena, the new tenant of this geometric exercise, is a young independent lawyer who has managed to assert herself vitally through a new housing concept. This apartment aims to use the intimate, work, and the culture in a diluted and flexible way to integrate into our post-pandemic socio-economic structures.