Origins
An apartment in the center of Valencia abandoned for years. The architecture studio directed by the architect Cristina Moya, carries out the reform and remodeling trying to preserve the original elements and maintaining the spirit of the space.
The project consists on the refurbishment of an apartment in a building dated 1940 in the centre of the city of Valencia.
We found the apartment in complete ruin, abandoned for many years, full of dust, water stains and cracks everywhere. Though we thought all of that had its thing, it spoke of the time passing by, of the past, of the beauty of the old.
Now the apartment needed a new life. Circumstances change, inhabitants change, time changes and for so the necessities.
The apartment has an irregular form, adapting to the chamfer, typical in the urban development of the city, wider in the exterior part and narrower in the interior. The former historical layout plan was made up of many small rooms, each intended for a specific and single use.
However nowadays, we look for bigger and wider spaces that give place to different functions in the same space and that we can use in different ways.
We started by throwing down the walls that weren’t needed in order to open up the spaces. The demolition didn’t leave us with a blank page, the mouldings on the ceilings preserved the shape of the former historical layout plan. During the demolition we discovered some columns that were hidden inside partitions. We decided to keep all of this so that the space would express the layers of history becoming a central feature of the refurbishment.
Just as you enter the apartment we created a big and light filled space that brings together different functions like entrance hall, kitchen, living room and dining room, all in one. In this way we try to enhance the relationships inside the apartment, connecting and sharing space and uses.
It is this single space that organizes the house, solves within itself the irregular shape and is from which you access the rest on the rooms.
The master suite, with the bedroom and open bathroom is located in the interior part of the apartment and both spaces are divide by a partition with no doors while the more private areas are closed with translucent glass introducing light into all of the corners.
In contrast with the decorative ceilings of gold leaf mouldings, we used neutral materials and simple and straight lines on the rest of the refurbishment. Since ceilings reproduce the different rooms of the former layout, we tried to work with the minimum materials to give continuity and unify the spaces in the apartment. To do so, we worked mainly with white to give brightness, wood for its cosiness and grey to distinguish wet areas such as baths and kitchen.
