Teruel House converts a former architecture studio in Madrid’s Tetuán district into a compact dwelling that preserves the clarity of its open span while reorienting the plan to focus on light, air, and adaptable occupation. The project exposes the reinforced concrete frame, threads a direct link between street and inner courtyard, and organizes domestic functions as reversible layers around a continuous floor plane. A pass-through bathroom and a multiuse room operate as infrastructural hinges, allowing the home to shift between daily living, work, and hosting without disturbing the core spatial order.
Teruel House Technical Information
- Architects1-2: Jorge Borondo + Ana Petra Moriyón
- Location: Tetuán, Madrid, Spain
- Gross Area: 81 m2 | 872 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years: 2023 – 2024
- Photographs: © Knu Kim
The transformation of this space starts with a fundamental idea: exposing the structure to enhance its spatial qualities and create a seamless connection between the two facades, linking the street to the inner courtyard while increasing natural light.
– Jorge Borondo and Ana Petra Moriyón
Teruel House Photographs
Context and Adaptive Reuse
Set within Tetuán’s mixed fabric, the project reclaims a ground-level workspace typical of the district’s incremental urbanism. The existing reinforced concrete frame and generous span are not concealed but made legible, positioning the domestic program within an infrastructural shell that already holds the memory of production and communal use. This approach resists over-partitioning, allowing the original volume to remain perceptible and the new domestic layer to read as a calibrated insertion rather than a total overwrite.
Two facades, one facing the street and one facing an inner courtyard, establish a deep plan that the design uses to capture daylight and promote cross-ventilation. Openings and alignments encourage air movement, while sightlines stretch across the interior to frame the depth of the space. The project treats permeability as a primary tool, using the plan’s length to stage a sequence from public threshold to private retreat without thickening the boundary conditions.
Minimal, legible elements are favored over heavy construction so that the original structural order remains the governing diagram. New components form a lightweight domestic scaffold around the exposed frame and brick enclosure, reinforcing the clarity of the existing skeleton while enabling future adjustments without compromising structural integrity.
Spatial Diagram and Circulation
A clear longitudinal axis links the two facades. A continuous self-leveling mortar floor extends from the entrance to the courtyard, collapsing level changes and emphasizing the space’s linearity. This neutral plane works as a datum that both organizes furniture and supports uninterrupted movement, making the primary circulation legible at a glance.
At the center of the plan, a pass-through bathroom serves as a hinge between the main bedroom and a flexible room. Dual access resolves privacy gradients with efficient circulation, eliminating dead ends and allowing users to loop through the sequence rather than backtrack. The arrangement creates a soft threshold between night and day zones, where the bathroom volume serves as both an amenity and a spatial regulator.
The multi-use room bridges both private and social areas, allowing it to function as a workspace, guest room, or to be visually and functionally integrated into the living area when needed. The scale of openings and the positioning of storage maintain generous apertures between zones, so the room can expand communal space without compromising the clarity of the core axis.
Structure and Material Tectonics
The project articulates the original fabric through exposure and refinement rather than concealment. Scraped concrete columns and beams, along with brick walls, impart the primary texture to the interior. New insertions adopt a restrained palette: birch plywood joinery introduces warmth and precision, salvaged wood flooring marks the entrance and bedroom as more intimate fields, and white limestone defines wet areas with a tactile, durable surface.
High-use elements, such as the kitchen worktop and stair railing, are made of stainless steel due to its robustness and ease of maintenance. The continuous self-leveling floor unifies these disparate materials, providing a consistent reflectance that enhances daylight distribution and simplifies the reading of the plan. Tolerances between new and existing finishes are handled as crisp reveals, acknowledging the junctions rather than hiding them.
Mirrors set in the jambs of glass block windows amplify light and depth, turning relatively compact openings into luminous devices. The strategy utilizes the mass of the concrete frame to provide thermal inertia. At the same time, the material palette focuses on durability and legibility, reducing the need for finishes that would obscure the structure’s role in the spatial composition.
Domestic Flexibility as Infrastructure
Programs are treated as reversible layers rather than fixed rooms. Storage and services are concentrated into compact bands to keep the primary volume open, leaving the perimeter available for changing occupation and light. Furniture-like partitions and joinery absorb functional loads, allowing for daily reconfiguration without moving heavy walls or interrupting circulation.
This arrangement supports multiple scenarios with minimal effort, from solitary work to hosting, without compromising the plan’s coherence. The pass-through bathroom and the multi-use room operate as switchable nodes, adjusting privacy and capacity while maintaining the structural and mechanical core’s stability.
Longevity is pursued through minimal intervention. The design retains and refines existing elements where possible, such as salvaged flooring, and limits new construction to non-load-bearing components that future users can rework. The combination of cross ventilation, exposed thermal mass, and a restrained material palette aligns operational comfort with reduced embodied impacts, allowing the space to evolve while the primary infrastructure remains intact.
Teruel House Plans
Teruel House Image Gallery
About Jorge Borondo Estudio
Founded in 2020 and based in Madrid, Jorge Borondo Estudio explores a wide range of architectural scales and typologies, encompassing furniture design, private residential works, and urban research. The studio is known for its thoughtful integration of spatial clarity, material authenticity, and adaptive reuse. With a focus on blending historical context and contemporary needs, their projects aim to preserve existing structures while creating versatile environments that evolve in tandem with their users. The studio’s work has been recognized both nationally and internationally, with contributions in academia and architectural discourse.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Client: Jorge Borondo + Ana Petra Moriyón
- Construction company: Fast & Furious Office, www.fastandfuriousoffice.com
