Home in Patraix

This 80 m² property was built in 1930, with highly compartmentalised spaces and inner rooms with no ventilation to the outside. This home in the Patraix district, to the south of Valencia, required a refurbishment that would adapt to the young couple’s reality. The starting point was therefore defined as extending spaces to enhance natural light and cross-ventilation within the home.

Our proposal is based on an architectural design that combines all spaces, making them more permeable and better connected. It seeks a wood-covered element to unify the home, featuring from west to east, and which contains much of the programme. It thus reinforces the idea of a simple utilitarian element and a joint open space.

This volume offers a different functional solution for the distinct spaces. In the bedroom, on the western side of the home, it becomes clothing storage. Outside the bedroom it becomes a small writing space. Then, in the central part of the home, it is a bathroom and, opposite the bathroom, a space for the television. Next it transforms into a cupboard to solve some of the home’s storage. And finally, on the eastern side of the home, it becomes a laundry space.

This element is intentionally conceived as an independent body with its own roof, separate from the home roof and thus stressing the concept of volume within the overall space of the home, enhancing the general height of the space.

Sliding doors are installed across this body so that the private space of the room can sometimes be separated from the more public part of the home without making the adjoining spaces any less permeable. The idea of sliding doors can offer wider visuals and gain cross ventilation in the home. When they are open, the home can be seen as a single space from the front façade to the back, giving it a sense of amplitude.

Another highlight of the refurbishment is the recovered hydraulic flooring, so characteristics of the Mediterranean home. All rooms in the original property had colourful hexagonal mosaic flooring. The project decided to highlight this early 20th century feature, turning it into the star of the home by redesigning the living-dining-bathroom area. The surrounding flooring is micro-cement, which seeks to unify the different hydraulic mosaic rugs, offering a more avant-garde aspect of the home.

Finally, natural colours like oak, grey and white were used to blend in with existing materials in the home, such as exposed brick and the wooden ceiling.

The result is a spacious, integrating, functional and cosy home with ideal natural light and ventilation to offer comfort for both residents and visitors.