West End House
The refurbishment work of a modern house from the 50 ́s with several layers of intervention, allowed us to reflect about the idea of preexistence. The neighborhood known as West End was the last phase of an urban expansion called Las Colonias, beginning at the end of XIX century. This area is known for having an extraordinary urban quality and there you can find good examples of regionalist, French-like and modern single-family housing. The original spatial structure of this generic type of dwelling -that we can find all over the area- characterized by a mezzanine space, has remained almost intact through the years, but a refurbishment made in the 90 ́s converted it in a version of the postmodern house that we can find in the newer suburban developments.
The main idea of our intervention was to recover the atmosphere of that original local modern type of architecture by using certain kind of materials like terrazzo, colored cement tiles, glass blocks and steel windows, but at the same time leaving certain vestiges from the other interventions found. Thus, we used basic refurbishment works as colored plastering and flooring to create a new atmosphere in relation with certain decorative elements found at the interior and exterior spaces. In order to achieve better results in transforming the house with the available budget, we avoided demolishing structural elements and proposed to intervene the spaces with custom made furniture, as in the case of the kitchen and the mezzanine. For the kitchen, the idea was to recover the traditional concept of an open cabinetry in which you can see -at least partially- their elements, in opposition to a typical contemporary model of kitchen, that is designed to hide everything as a way to achieve certain kind of ascetic feeling.
