MUSSOL 334 | studio BONBA

The Muss34 project commission was born when our client decides to contact us to explore the possibility of give a change to their home.

The flat is located at a 2-storey building in a residential neighbourhood of a Palma de Mallorca suburb.

The basic functional brief for a 4-member family do not change from existing, however we proposed a project where the distribution of the main rooms is modified, preserving the location of the rooms, and reorganizing them internally. Attending to one of client’s main requirement when we first contact is to use the project to create a new, more open, and functional distribution of the flat.

We find an apartment designed to live in a more classic way: corridors, lobbies between the different rooms, service area; basically, a lack of floor plan optimization with spaces that hardly dialogue with each other. This series of pre-existing conditions do not allow to exploit the charm and potential of an only 16 years old house, which has practically four winds facade, with extraordinary ventilation and lighting qualities as it is all exterior and until today, they were not exploit. We got ride off all partitions in the entrance area, dining room, living room and kitchen to have a unique space to organize the space through a volume with a program that, while functioning as a piece of furniture, divides the space into three areas, kitchen entrance and dining room.

As we enter the house, we find an L-shaped volume with a terracotta colour. This colour was chosen since the client asked us for the project to remind him of his experiences in Morocco. This volume shows us its functional program, always giving it use on all sides in order to avoid encountering blind walls. At the entrance a closet, a shelving area and on the other side facing the dining room a bar cabinet.

Following our way in we find the passage to the dining-living room, which communicates directly with the passage to the kitchen with an open bar, for the show cooking, which was also one of the client's requirements. We could say that this beyond been a success, became the epicentre of the flat activity since the client now enjoys cooking and sharing that moment. Once in the kitchen we found the black marquina marble top and the sage-green furniture, we wanted to treat it this way so that it would not look like a kitchen itself, but just another area of ​​the living room. Converting to the main volume on one hand gives us all the functions for the kitchen, and on the living area, directed towards the terrace, a large shelf.

The flooring throughout the house is wide-plank oak parquet and in the wet areas, both the kitchen and the bathroom, it is large-format ceramic with a terrazzo finish.

The skirting and the door frames have also been lacquered in terracotta, to give contrast and create a continuity towards the rooms.

In the secondary rooms the only action was to update flooring and lighting.

In the main room, at the end of the corridor, we find a disproportion between bedroom and bathroom en suite, in addition to a rather strange arrangement of the pieces. The client needed more space so we propose a different orientation of the bed, and much more closet. Following the criteria used in the kitchen-dining room, where the elements that separate spaces have a program on it, in this case a 3m long closet is used in the dressing room bathroom area on one side and on the other we use it as bedhead, changing the colour in its lower part for a green leaf. The entire dividing cabinet is unified around its perimeter by an oak wood detail that on one side serves as a union between lacquers and on the other becomes a handle for the closet doors.

The 3 m long bathroom countertop, opposite the wardrobe and illuminated by a window in its central axis, makes the space more comfortable to use by optimizing the space by joining the dressing area with the sink area. Behind this area of ​​the sink and mirror, there are the most humid and private areas such as the shower and the toilet cabin. All the bathroom walls were done in white microcement, even in the shower to create a Spa feeling.

In summary, Muss 34 is an example of refurbishment that attempts to adapt to the new needs of society, which expresses the qualities of the place and ultimately generates a more harmonious and dynamic space.