Project: Flat White
Architecture: gon architects + Ana Torres
Responsible architects: Gonzalo Pardo, Ana Torres
Design team: Carol Linares, Cristina Ramírez, María Cecilia Cordero, Kostís Toulgaridis, Celia Urbano
Construction: Proiescon sl
Lighting: Olive lighting sa
Location: Madrid, Spain
Year 2022
Built area: 45 m2
Photography: Subliminal Image (Miguel de Guzmán + Rocío Romero)
Text by gon architects
Designing anonymous homes , without a specific end user, offers the opportunity (and the challenge) to investigate and put into practice concepts such as the flexibility, perfectibility and versatility of the occupation and the ability to adapt domestic space and time.
This is the case of flat white, an apartment to rent for long periods of time, a commission that consists of designing, in the words of the client himself, “a neutral house” -as if this were possible- capable of being occupied by any inhabitant with any lifestyle; a rehabilitation of a 45m2 space located in the center of Madrid, near the recently renovated Plaza de España.
Starting from a plan with almost square geometric proportions , originally divided in the middle by a load-bearing wall, a house is projected that seeks, above all, to be a good place to live to which its future generic occupants will be able to adapt.
Faced with the excessive division into rooms of different sizes of the house in the state prior to the reform, the new organization of the house is articulated in four rooms -corresponding to the archetypal pieces of all traditional domestic space (kitchen-dining room, living room, bedroom and bathroom) – of similar dimensions, about 10 m2, and without a corridor.
The four rooms, physically and visually connected – topologically related to each other – allow us to understand the house as a system: a large room that contains all the necessary domestic programmatic needs where the public/private, interior/exterior limits are diluted.
This large room puts into play several principles present in ideologically advanced homes, such as the de-hierarchization of spaces , the kitchen as the protagonist of the house, the atomized bathroom or the rooms without a predetermined use.
The hypothetical spatial neutrality demanded is achieved through the use of white on all surfaces , horizontal and vertical, floors and walls, but also in elements of the house such as the kitchen, the sink, the shower or the toilet.
The use of color in the rest of the house is limited to the different mobile parts, which constitute a system of objects for carrying out different actions, such as sleeping, eating, washing or resting.
Carol and Celia, a couple of entrepreneurs recently arrived in the capital and the protagonists of this report, are the first of the many occupants of this blank house on which to draw a future where the best, without a doubt, is yet to come.
