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A 1960s ground-floor studio in Madrid’s Tetuán district, rebooted for everyday living by architects Jorge Borondo and Ana Petra Moriyón.
A slice of early sun slips under the street-side shutters and skims across a low timber platform just inside the door. One gentle step up and you’re in a quieter register: city grit outside, warm grain underfoot. The plinth hides shoes and power cords behind flush birch doors, while three concrete steps—precise as a carpenter’s off-cut—hug its flank and lead you to the main floor in a single, easy motion.
The apartment runs only 81 square meters, so every line counts. Borondo and Moriyón pulled the plan taut: street façade at one end, courtyard glass at the other, nothing in between to block the view—or the breeze. Along the north wall, the kitchen keeps its words to itself: pale birch fronts, carved finger pulls, a stainless counter that catches daylight like a mirror in soft focus. Even the plumbing owns its role, a white pipe strapped to a raw concrete beam with a single metal clamp.
Behind this clear-cut line sits the project’s party trick—a bathroom that opens on two sides, knitting the primary bedroom to a flex room that covers guest duty, Zoom call backdrops, or late-night movie marathons. Slide a panel here, pivot a door there, and the layout drifts from loft-like openness to two-bedroom privacy without dragging furniture across the floor.
Materials stay on repeat: concrete left rough enough to remember its shutter boards; self-levelling mortar underfoot, chalk-matte and cool; birch and oak warming the touch points; stainless steel making brief, targeted cameos where water lives. The cadence reads like a four-bar loop—cool, warm, cool, warm—steady enough to disappear until you stop and notice.
Toward dusk, three coin-sized ventilation holes punched high in a plaster panel turn into tiny sundials, spinning soft discs of light across the floorboards. It’s a small moment, but it sums up Casa Teruel’s quiet confidence: let the structure breathe, let the light wander, and let the occupants decide the rest. The apartment doesn’t shout its cleverness—it just keeps the stage clear so life can do the talking.
Photography by Knu Kim
