In Madrid, OOIIO Architecture has reimagined a standard apartment in a working-class neighborhood, transforming it into a unique and personalized home on a modest budget. By creatively using readily available, standardized materials, the design balances affordability with originality. Features include expressive ceramic details evoking Spanish tradition and playful bedroom elements blending into the living space. TUR House demonstrates how intelligent arrangement and creativity can elevate mass-market solutions, offering an alternative to industrialized housing trends.
From the Architects | The current trend in the construction market is leading us toward a world of industrialized and repetitive solutions. Large developers offer “one-size-fits-all” homes, finished with neutral, bland materials. By offering standardized products, they can appeal to a wider range of buyers and ensure a quicker, easier sale.
But what happens to those who seek a unique and special home? Either they have the financial means to build their own house, or they are forced to buy the same apartment as their neighbor, even though their lifestyles may be completely different.
However, it is increasingly difficult to find carpenters or blacksmiths who work by hand, and the few who do are often unaffordable for most people. Standardized options are more economical because they can be endlessly replicated by machines, not crafted by people. By using readily available materials from any hardware store, where the same products that developers use for their mass-market solutions are sold at similar prices, we can find elements capable of transforming a space into something unique and original.
TUR House is an exercise in total customization of a home in a standard apartment block, located in a working-class neighborhood, within an affordable budget, taking advantage of the opportunities that the industry already offers. It is neither a demonstration of craftsmanship nor a utopian manifesto for a return to traditional manual labor. Rather, it is a commitment to originality, uniqueness, and personalization using existing solutions and materials from the market. With standard products, arranged intelligently and creatively, you can achieve truly unique results.
Ceramics, for example, is a splendid material deeply rooted in Spanish culture since the Arab tradition, and even earlier. By selecting expressive and evocative pieces and placing them in unexpected locations, we transform a space into something distinct and special. In the living room of TUR House, a ceramic wainscot evokes the feeling of an outdoor patio, while the intentionally childlike bedroom extends into the living room like a cloud drifting through a landscape where a lamp becomes the sun. The IKEA kitchen is personalized with a wood-paneled countertop, and the simple white doors are enhanced with panels that reflect the shapes and color palette of the rest of the home. All of this is combined with carefully selected, well-designed furniture at affordable prices.
Photography by Javier de Paz.
Like what you see? Get it first with a subscription to aspire design and home magazine.