Locker room
Architecture and interior design studio Ortega Diago, founded by Gonzalo Sánchez Ortega and Armando Diago, presents a facility-scale project: the rehabilitation of an industrial warehouse wing into a high-capacity changing complex.
Designed to accommodate over a hundred workers daily, the intervention eschews conventional compartmentalization. Instead, it introduces an architecture rooted in fluid circulation and structural honesty, placing spatial quality at the heart of a strictly utilitarian brief.
A Fluid, Unobstructed Spatial Sequence
The project occupies a markedly elongated footprint, dictated by the longitudinal morphology of the existing factory. Faced with the challenge of bringing order to a high-density, intensive-use programme, the design strategy rejects dead-end corridors and opaque floor-to-ceiling partitions that would have condemned the interior to shadow. Instead, the floor plan is structured around a series of freestanding walls arranged in varying directions and heights.
These bold volumes geometrically overlap, concealing the changing areas from common circulation paths without completely enclosing the spaces. This allows natural light to flow freely from both overhead and lateral openings, fostering an intuitive and fluid path where the architecture guides and protects individual privacy without imposing visual barriers.
“We knew from the outset that the vertical partitions needed to allow light through while safeguarding the privacy of the changing areas. We relied on materiality to give hierarchy, weight, and a tectonic order to each of these walls,” Ortega Diago explains.
Materiality as Hierarchy: Granite and Stainless Steel
The intervention embraces an honest, sober materiality that dialogues with the surrounding industrial character. Ortega Diago sought a durable resilience capable of withstanding heavy daily use while maintaining an atmosphere of profound serenity.
Granite emerges as the dominant, unifying element of the project. Deployed continuously across flooring, vertical cladding, and monolithic doorways, its textured finish lends a haptic quality to the walls, breaking away from the typical clinical feel of such facilities.
This stone weight finds its counterpoint in the clean fronts of the lockers, executed entirely in satin-finish stainless steel. This technical component introduces sharp highlights and diffused reflections that capture the light and multiply visual perspectives, lending the space an unexpected sense of depth.
Architectural rigour manifests in the integration of monolithic elements and custom solutions that eschew pure decoration. Continuous board-marked exposed concrete benches serve as a solid plinth supporting the storage modules. Meanwhile, large dark-stained hardwood doors mark the entrances, introducing a warm nuance paired with tubular metal handles.
This interplay between warm and cool elements is completed by the light-toned, rough-textured perimeter plaster walls, which act as reflective canvases where light glides, giving the space an intimate density.
The Honesty of Utilitarian Detail
Every corner of the intervention exudes design through rigorous formal restraint. On the locker fronts, module numbering is engraved directly onto the stainless steel with clean, minimalist typography.
The washroom area reinforces this lightness through a linear sequence of wall-hung ceramic basins supported by slender chrome legs, leaving the traps exposed. Crowned individually by recessed mirrors and spherical bulb sconces, these elements introduce a refined, technical counterpoint.
The path culminates at an open window at the far end of the floor plan, breaking the solidity of the walls to frame a direct view of the outdoor greenery, inviting the user into a conscious, serene relationship with their daily space of respite.
