‘La Crepa’ Food Stall in Madrid by Plutarco.Housed within a neat 13 square metre shopfront, La Crepa is a little creperie and wine bar designed by Plutarco – a Madrid-based studio named after a Greek philosopher paraphrased by Shakespeare and admired by Francis...
Malababa Flagship in Madrid, Spain by Ciszak Dalmas & Matteo Ferrari.Sometimes you get the perfect symbiotic relationship between client and architect. It’s like lucking out on your dance card. You score the perfect partner. Ciszak Dalmas and Matteo Ferrari had just such a partnership when they...
Antoni Gaudi’s Casa Vicens in Barcelona Restored by Martínez Lapeña–Torres Arquitectes & Daw Office.Like most of Gaudí’s work, this famous, first residential commission of the Catalonian architect, it is not subtle. No-one could accuse Antoni Gaudí of being a minimalist. The striking exterior of layered brick patterns, highly...
Sweet Storage Dreams: Playful Barcelona Apartment in Born by CaSA.Colombo and Serboli Architecture’s recent apartment refurbishment in Barcelona could be filed under ‘storage porn’. It’s a playful modification to a 65sqm flat set within a historic 13th-century building in El Born. The client, a...
Bricks Decoded: The Return of Glass Blocks.Go on. Admit it. The thought of glass blocks probably makes you shudder. Unless you fall into the 5%* category of new generation designers who have already embraced the potential of this highly misunderstood and marginalised building...
Poli-Piel: Jorge Penadés Serrano’s First Solo Show at Gallery Machado-Muñoz in Madrid.Jorge Penadés has kept up his innovative exploration of left-over materials with a new eight-piece collection that pushes the potential of leather as a sturdy structural material, presented as part of Madrid Design...
110 Rooms: MAIO Architects’ Jaw-Dropping Apartment Building in Barcelona.Some projects just make you sit up straight in your chair, stop whatever else you were trying to do at the time, and pay close attention. This is exactly what happened when I first came across this residential building in Barcelona...
CASAPLATA Restaurant & Cocktail Bar in Seville by Lucas y Hernández-Gil.CASPALATA in the heart of Seville suggests a new kind of vision and future for restaurant and cocktail bar design. Madrid-based studio Lucas y Hernández-Gil have purposefully sidestepped tried and true nostalgia in favour of creating...
Marble-Made Tent in the Galaxy: Romola Restaurant in Madrid by Andres Jaque.Bursting from the former garage space of a 40s-era Luis Gutiérrez Soto building in Madrird, Romola Restaurant immediately reminds me of the jade powder room in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz. Its futurist...
