casa EME
"When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there."
The dinosaur. Augusto Monterroso, 1959.
The story of casa EME begins with a memory and a desire. A memory belonging to Manuel, its owner -an enthusiast of design and cooking- when he first entered the apartment, before purchasing it, during one of many visits to flats in central Madrid and had the feeling of having already lived in a similar place, at least with the same spirit, but in another time. And a desire: to imagine himself reading in that house on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, sitting on the sofa as light pours in through the five large windows of the living room, framing the city with views over Plaza Mayor, Calle Toledo, Plaza de Puerta Cerrada, and the Collegiate Church of San Isidro el Real, sites deeply rooted in Madrid’s traditional urban identity.
Located in a corner building in the Madrid de los Austrias, casa EME acts as a watchtower inserted into a dense and compact urban fabric of Baroque origin -already marked in Pedro Texeira’s famous 1646 map- surrounded by the hustle and bustle and tourism characteristic of contemporary historic centers. With a floor plan whose geometry recalls the shape of a bow tie, the original 108 m² apartment, fully oriented toward the exterior, lacked a clear spatial logic. It was composed of five rooms of varying sizes, six balconies, and two street-facing windows, unified by an impressive continuous floor of solid tropical IPE wood in multiple tones. Like a large carpet, the flooring covered the entire apartment, with the only exception of the bathroom, which was finished in ceramic.
The layout and spatial relationships between the different uses of the original domestic program were poorly resolved: the kitchen, associated with an oversized bathroom, was hidden at the back of the house; the bedroom, which was small and far from the bathroom, had two entrances, one of them directly from the living room, which made it difficult to organize both rooms properly; and, in the center of the house, the darkest space -and yet the most singular due to its trapezoidal geometry- appeared as a large empty circulation area with no defined use, accentuating the lack of coherence of the whole. A missed opportunity.
The new proposal is based on a strict and deliberate premise: to preserve the existing wooden floor in its entirety, not only as a covering, but as a material memory that anchors the project to place and time. This decision conditions an intervention whose main virtue lies in working with what already exists, while reestablishing the topological and programmatic relationships of the apartment to suit Manuel’s way of living.
The floor was already there and that is how it was left: with the marks of repeated use, with that imperfect stability that the passage of time gives to things. Upon this same wood, the new home unfolds, maintaining the system of rooms from the previous configuration. Like a game of sliding pieces, the program shifts across the plan until it reaches a new order, a clearer, more efficient, and more suggestive way of reading the domestic space.
Among the most significant reprogramming operations, the bedroom is now directly linked to the bathroom, whose interior evokes an outdoor landscape through the use of greens in varying tones. This connection is articulated by a closed, cloud-green pass-through volume that promotes flexibility of use and integrates clothing storage. Both spaces are now connected through the footprint of the former bathroom, materialized as a ceramic trace that, rather than being concealed, is deliberately exposed, emphasizing time and the memory embedded in the house.
The kitchen now occupies the heart of the home: a social space that becomes the center and meeting point when friends gather to taste Manuel’s specialty: beef ragu lasagna. The entrance, the most fragile and narrow point of the apartment, barely one meter wide and serving as the hinge between the public and private realms, is redefined by lowering the ceiling and marking it in yellow. Finally, one of the doors that previously connected to the living room is removed, transforming that space into an unnamed, flexible room of multiple uses, equally suited for studying or accommodating guests without disrupting Manuel’s daily rhythm.
Each new room is defined by specific furniture that either integrates into the space as continuous floor-to-ceiling storage or forms part of a system of objects that qualifies and characterizes each room. The living-dining room, on the other side of the electric-blue-clad column, finished with a zigzag-textured material that echoes the geometry of the house while improving acoustic performance, emerges as a landscape of scattered objects: sofa, table, lamp, shelving, television. These elements float freely in space, without rigid hierarchies, encouraging a contemporary and open-ended domesticity. The elimination of corridors gives rise to a new domestic topography: a sequence of trapezoidal and irregular rooms organically linked together.
Transitions between rooms, free of doors, occur through thresholds articulated by color and texture. Wood, metal, fabric, aluminum, ceramic, and resin coexist in Casa EME alongside a vibrant chromatic palette—red, blue, yellow, white, and green—constructing an almost hidden layer of domestic information. An architecture connected not only to the visual and the formal, but also to touch and smell, seeking to recover the sensory experience of inhabiting space.
Casa EME reflects on the idea of acting with intention rather than excess; of preserving instead of demolishing, and of reusing before building. The result is a project in which the movement of the body through the apartment constantly traverses a series of spatial binaries: from public to private, from compressed to expanded, and from open to closed. A place that does not seek to impose itself, but to reactivate a house that, as in Monterroso’s micro story, was always there.
It only needed to be awakened.
CREDITS
Arquitecture Leader: Gonzalo Pardo
Design Team: Carol Linares, María Cecilia Cordero, Sara Mordt, Alvine Ikauniece, Alexandra Marouda, Manuel Domínguez
