In the last twenty years, during which Andrés had occupied a room in his sister's house, he kept in the storage room all those objects and design furniture that he had been collecting.
In May he called me for a coffee after having signed a deal to buy an 84 m2 penthouse on Calle Pelayo for 210,000 euros.
"Gonzalo, now I want to live alone. I need a lot of light and darkness to sleep. I hate air conditioning. I work at home on weekends and meet with people although I never have parties. I collect contemporary art. I like to eat in the kitchen and read on the couch. I take a long time to shower and am obsessed with tidiness. I have very little money and want to celebrate New Year's Eve at home."
How could I make the best home for Andrés that would satisfy his desires, in a penthouse that is small, in the center of Madrid, with a tight time frame and a limited budget?
The house was a watchtower of small windows overlooking Madrid, with no natural light, overly compartmentalized, and overlooking an interior courtyard.
The decision making was clear and precise: to empty the space by removing false ceilings and partitions, to open to the east towards the patio and the silence; to the west towards the city and the people; the roof towards the unique blue sky of Madrid and to cross the space by a magnetic line that radiates redness and attracts all those objects susceptible of being perfectly stored; to abandon the void so that Andrés defines each space when he occupies it. The simplest solution is usually the right one.
The project bets on the standardization of one of the most expensive and at the same time most important elements in a domestic space: the storage system. In this way, a continuous high-gloss red cabinet 14.50 meters long, 0.60 meters wide, and with a volume of 22.27 m3 made from kitchen cabinet modules that runs through the domestic space articulating it and adapts to it like a glove is built.
The furniture frees the rest of the house and allows a fluid and continuous space where to develop domestic actions: sleeping and having sex turned to the east, dressing under a neon that leads to the living room to work and read with views to the west of Madrid, eating in front of a bookshelf, entering through a red hole to the house, grooming overlooking the courtyard.
Next to the furniture, and in contrast to the compartmentalization of the traditional house by partitions, the other element that organizes the space through geometry is the floor: wooden carpets that, through their colour changes, define rooms and at the same time can be associated with sensations. In the bedroom, the black oak is reminiscent of the entrance from a cave to a lair where one retreats to rest, or the birch in the kitchen, to the image of the freshness and light of the morning.
On the thirtieth of December 2016 at eleven o'clock in the morning a van was on its way to Pelayo Street transporting Andrés' furniture, objects and books. While the operators were unloading and loading the goods, Andrés was carefully placing his belongings inside the house.
I was the one driving the van.
