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Architects: Beatriz Arroyo, Lys Villalba
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Photographs:José Hevia
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Manufacturers: Huguet, In-Out, Nouvelle Cuisine, Persiana Barcelona
Urban Cabinets is a series of housing rehabilitation projects that explore design strategies around the concept of furniture architecture. In each of them, a family of furniture-that-turns-into-spaces configures domesticities halfway between these two scales. The furniture grows, becomes XXL, and is thought architecturally. It values handmade and custom-made materials, artisanally made in small companies, and in whose final execution, different construction trades from both areas will enter into dialogue on-site.
The first project in the series addresses the renovation of a 1950s home in the Salamanca neighborhood of Madrid. The original home, which divided the public space of the house into different rooms - entrance hall, living room, study, kitchen, hallway - hindered cross ventilation, the enjoyment of southern light in winter, and access to the terrace. The renovation proposes to unify this domestic environment - cleaning and leaving its structure exposed; recovering the original terrace - and articulate it through a series of furniture architectures that equip the space inhabited by this family.
Eating, conversing, studying, playing, painting, cooking, reading, working... In Urban Cabinet Series (1) everything takes place around a table. And it is the design of this table - placed transversely in the space, in an undefined place between programs - that reconfigures the domesticities of the house. Handcrafted in colored terrazzo sprinkled with small confetti-like pieces, the 3.5m long and 1.05m wide tabletop rests on a structure of three pairs of metal cylinders anchored to the floor, thus freeing up all the space around it.
On one side of it, the kitchen, whose shorter front becomes the second piece of this family of small furniture architectures: a reversible cabinet, with a countertop on one side and a coat rack on the other, perforated by an oculus from which to look out upon arriving home.
On the other side, is the living office, where a second table organizes a collective study space. Two lateral supports made of folded steel sheets and a standardized maximum length wooden board (366 cm) blend without screws or joints, configuring free work support for the whole family.
