Abastos Apartment
Abastos Apartment
DETAILS
Full renovation | Design, documentation and construction management
Year 2026
105 m2 | 3 Bedrooms | 2 Bathrooms
Renders by Arrevés
TEAM
Pedro Garcia, Maaike Pullar
Urban regfuge – Expanded domesticity in Abastos
The comprehensive renovation of a dwelling in the Abastos neighbourhood is conceived as a reconsideration of the home, understood not solely as a private realm but as an urban refuge and a third space: an intermediate place between the domestic and the public. The dwelling thus assumes a semi‑public condition, capable of accommodating social, cultural, or professional activities, and of incorporating references drawn from collective spaces at a personal and domestic scale.
The project is articulated through two principal spatial gestures that organise the interior in a deliberately non‑conventional manner.
A system of perimeter envelopes in the form of baseboards runs through and embraces the different spaces, providing continuity, rhythm, and a unifying scale. In tension with this continuous system, a central ring is inserted at the heart of the dwelling as an autonomous and disruptive body, housing the kitchen and operating as a spatial threshold.
Both systems rest on a continuous floor plane that recalls traditional nolla or marble pavements and lends the ensemble a character closer to the public realm than to conventional domesticity.
The ring, defined by its own chromatic palette, divides the dwelling into two clearly differentiated areas—the access and day zone, and the zone of bedrooms and bathrooms—requiring one to pass through it to move from one to the other. This condition turns the ring into an inhabitable threshold and endows the kitchen with a scale and logic typical of more social or commercial spaces, transferring into the domestic interior a quality usually foreign to it. The kitchen’s materiality, with wooden fronts, balances this character by introducing warmth and familiarity.
The perimeter envelopes are organised into three levels. A general baseboard runs along the living room, corridor, and bedrooms, unifying the ensemble along the perimeter. A second level surrounds the bathrooms as autonomous pieces, while a third, more contained embrace defines the shower areas. Together, these gestures construct a continuous and rhythmic interior that reinforces the idea of a domestic space with a collective vocation, close to the atmosphere of a small hotel, a club, or a cultural space, without abandoning its condition as a home.
The main baseboard, given depth through the incorporation of shelving, traverses the central ring and stitches together the two parts of the house, intensifying spatial continuity and transforming the corridor into an active space—a library or gallery.
In the bedrooms, the use of floor‑to‑ceiling wooden panelling as wardrobe fronts, the presence of exposed metal profiles, and the asymmetrical arrangement of lighting shift the character of the space from that of a conventional domestic bedroom toward a hotel room or a hybrid environment for work and interaction.
In the bathrooms, a linear drawer unit with a ceramic countertop is configured as a floating horizontal bar that interrupts the continuity of the enveloping baseboards, reproducing at a reduced scale the disruptive logic of the central ring.
Interior aluminium joinery lacquered in a deep garnet colour, together with coloured luminaires, add an urban and contemporary layer to the ensemble, reinforced in the living room and corridor through track‑lighting systems that recall exhibition or cultural spaces.
The result is a compact yet intense dwelling that blurs the boundaries between the private and the collective, proposing a way of inhabiting in which the interior becomes a space of hospitality, gathering, and refuge within the city.