Casa EA3 | ESTUDIO BRAVA

Family of 7 Members / Ways of Life

EA3 is the renovation project of a home located in the expansion area of Cartagena for a family of 7 members (2 humans and 5 non-humans) with the desire to update their living space.

The compartmentalization of rooms and uses in a house today has given way to a fluidity that reflects the complexity and diversity of contemporary lives. In these spaces, care intertwines with pleasure, hygiene with rest, creating a living fabric that adapts to the needs and desires of its inhabitants. Homes should become a dynamic reflection of contemporary life.

The concept of "home" has expanded to include not only the traditional family but also a diversity of family models and living communities that include not only people but also other living beings.

30 Years of Objects

Furniture, memories, clothes, books... The life of an apartment could be summarized in the accumulation of objects over its 30 years of life. In this renovation, the backstage and storage become essential aspects of the home, building compact cores that free up large spaces to be colonized by the users, aiming to eliminate circulation spaces and load them with program. In the design process with the clients, 3 strategies were proposed:

The Compact Core: With the idea that the mutability of spaces is conditioned by fixed elements (installations). The proposal optimizes the existing home by building a compact core of installations and freeing up as much space as possible in the living room.

The Super Furniture: A box that gathers all the storage of the living room and kitchen and completely frees the other half of the living room. Designed with the idea of associating/eliminating the entrance hall by turning it into an active area of the home (giving it use). The proposal builds a hinge piece between the first space and the second, accumulating all the storage in the center and freeing the other two zones.

The Equipped Wall: The project unifies the living room, entrance hall, and kitchen in the same space by building an equipped wall that cleans the space, gathering the uses of kitchen, storage, technology, and pets. The rest of the room is left free, with the users ultimately settling, colonizing, and modifying the uses through the furniture. During the development of the project, this last strategy was chosen, adapting it to the irregularities of the existing structure and layout to minimize waste and cost.

White on White Painting

The project reflects a client's desire to turn their home into a "white house." Starting from this premise, the project tries to move away from this "glossy" and impersonal aesthetic that floods platforms like Pinterest, creating a chromatic chart that integrates materials and techniques that tend to fall out of use, such as textured paint or terrazzo, valuing them but above all, avoiding their unnecessary demolition. This approach not only respects the history and character of the home but also promotes a more sustainable and conscious practice in interior remodeling. The result is a palette of white shades ranging from bone to cream tones and grays. The decision to maintain and integrate these materials allows cost savings, concentrating the budget on the living room and kitchen areas, and limiting the rest of the house's interventions to painting and floor polishing.

Designing a Patch

Terrazzo is a hybrid material between artisanal and industrial. It is mass-produced, but the types of stone and glass used and the dosages/colors make it very difficult to replicate two different batches (especially with 30 years of separation). Given the impossibility of obtaining pieces of the same terrazzo, it was decided to lift 6 square meters of the existing floor and mix it with other tiles of radically different granulometry and color, forcing the appearance of the patch as a design element. The result is a sort of gradient between the existing pavement and the new one, ultimately homogenized by polishing and buffing.