CLIENT

Private

LOCATION

San Sebastián de La Gomera, Spain

CATEGORY

Refurbishment

PHOTOGRAPHY

Flavio Dorta

The site is located in the town of San Sebastián de La Gomera, on the top of a hill next to a main road that connects the neighbourhood of La Lomada with the old town centre. Its elevated position offers fantastic views of the bay, the town centre and the ravine.

The flat previously consisted of a number of compartmentalized rooms, which did not make the most of the opportunities that the location of the site offered: good natural lighting and ventilation, great orientation and excellent views.

We proposed to ‘open up’ the plan as much space as possible, accumulating the majority of the main uses (e.g. kitchen, bathroom, storage, etc) into a single central core treated as a fitted piece of furniture. Through this simple change to the layout, we reduced circulation spaces to a minimum, improved the overall flow through the house significantly and achieved more generous and flexible rooms.

Three sliding doors allow the user to organise the spaces efficiently allowing maximum flexibility of use. This also helped to improve the natural light and cross ventilation, as well as implementing the visual connections within the apartment and the views out.

The material palette chosen is very simple to allow the spaces to be the main feature of the house, timber floors across all rooms and white plasterboard to walls and ceilings. The central core is treated as an abstract element and it is finished to match the rest of thefurniture of the house using birch plywood panels.

A simple and efficient proposal, working with a tight budget and very limited space, that aims to offer a more flexible and dynamic way of living to the client.