Ca la Maña

Understanding architecture and the city as a support for life, as a scenario that generates and makes possible different relationships and lifestyles, is the principle that guides the interventions we make from Fent Estudi.

The way we approach rehabilitation and regeneration, which constitutes almost the whole of our experience at both urban and domestic levels, responds to a respectful approach, a listening-based analysis and an intervention that emphasizes what remains. During this process the inhabitants are the protagonists and all the project effort goes towards building a unique home for a unique way of life.

The proposal arises from the continuous dialogue with these two projective elements. The pre-existing house, with its impositions and opportunities, and the family who will inhabit it, with their customs, their way of life, hopes and expectations. Under this prism, each intervention will be different, as a result of the logic of the house-location and of its inhabitants, Toni and Núria.

A process of constant decision on what remains and what is indispensable, modifiable or unable to be salvaged. A process also of progressive nudity, of discovery and encounter with structures, routes, visuals, lights, currents, smells, sounds, reflexes, objects ... with everything that gives identity and meaning to the place. The challenge we face is to put on a high value an anonymous, vernacular construction, where its sincerity is constructive and its authenticity is deposited in its corners, ceramics, footprints, shadows and sediments, showing the memory of a house that has been felt, breathed, lived ... The intervention will not be the protagonist, but something to place on a high value the pre-existing spatiality and materiality, adapting it to the new requirements of habitability.

This logic of architectural intervention is taken to the photography of the house. We opt for images full of life, in which the presence of the inhabitants is fundamental. As Xavier Monteys says at Casa Collage, we try to avoid "those images of domestic interiors displayed in architectural publications that seem to systematically evade the presence of people and their utensils; as if these interiors were already complete, without the need or without the possibility of being furnished or inhabited. "

In the historic center of Torrent we find "Ca La Maña", a house built in 1920 that has been classified as a Local Relevant Property because of its typology of a traditional Valencian house (dwelling, patio, platform). This original scheme had been modified over the years with the adhesion of certain improper volumes to house the kitchen and bathroom, significantly  reducing the patio area.

The project contemplates a rehabilitation action that respects the typomorphology of the property, its envelope and the elimination of the improper elements existing in the inner courtyard. The kitchen is projected as an independent compositional element and formally to distinguish it from the original building, solving the typological / functional structure relation from a more contemporary view.

The whole intervention aims to respect the typomorphology and features that characterize the traditional Valencian house