ONE CLOSET HOUSE | Tomas Garcia Piriz Studio

After more than 40 years living in the same apartment, the owner, a retired woman, decides to completely transform her home. This exercise would involve a complete transformation of her lifestyle, still anchored in a past that she was hard to leave behind. On the one hand, the owner needed a new space of her own that would respond to her current situation, far removed from that shared by the entire family in the past. On the other, it was necessary to accommodate  the thousands of objects accumulated after almost half a century of memories that needed to find a place from which to claim their prominent role in her personal history.

The project therefore starts from a necessary revision of the functional program, the home had gone from being made up of four to a single inhabitant. This prompted a reduction in the number of spaces available in the house, a 100 m2 apartment located on the seventh floor of a block of flats in the city of Granada. In front of the four original rooms (parents, children and study) that accompanied the living room, kitchen and bathrooms, it is proposed to readjust these to get a large bedroom for the owner of the house, as well as having a space for guests. Kitchen and living room are also expanded, fulfilling the wishes of expansion of spaces for daily use versus those that uses at night.

The main operation would consist of the insertion of a linear infrastructure that organizes the entire house longitudinally. This element acts in a complementary way, becoming furniture and wall, closet and door, hollow and solid, all at the same time. Thinking about the huge amount of furniture that the owner had used, spent and thrown away to expose, save and store her belongings and objects, the possibility was now raised that all this sum of functions associated with tables, sideboards, cabinets, countertops, wardrobes, hallways it will be fused into a single guide element 15 meters long and 75 cm deep.

The cabinet, made of birch plywood, is made up of other sub-cabinets stacked vertically and horizontally. These elements make up a variable infrastructure, adaptable according to the needs at each point of the house, becoming a gallery in the hallway, a closet in the bedroom, a storage space and a refrigerator in the kitchen, a showcase and a bookcase in the living room, or a versatile space and a bed in the bedroom. Taking care of both sides of the furniture, the division of the width (75cms) to half, one and two thirds or the full thickness, allows to offer an alternative of resources with different functions, closed or open, with shelves or empty, transparent or opaque. cabinets or shelves, even become a bed, table or a built-in picture frame to welcome visitors to the home.

The fact that each element in the set is thought in isolation (structurally and programmatically) allows that, in the future, if the owner decides to move to live with one of her children, it can be disassembled and assembled in a different way, completely changing the organization. of the house. The infrastructure is updated prepared for the storage of new memories.

Colaborators: Rocío López Berenguer (Architect) / Pedro Salinas Aivar (Architect)

Client: Private

Constructor: CONSTRUCCIONES REQUENA ASENJO / CARPINTERÍA CALVO YELAMOS

Photographs: Fernando Alda

Placement: C/ José Recuerda / GRANADA

Budget: 62. 000 Euros

Cost m2: 620 E/m2

Surface: 100 m2

Ended Date: Jan 2021

Materials: Byrch Plywood (Furniture) / Oak Wood (Flooring) / Aluminium Carpenters/ Silextone / Pladur