Cabinet House

TR

Designed by P+S Estudio de Arquitectura, the Cabinet House is located in Madrid, Spain. The office describes the project as follows:

The main requirement from the owner for the renovation of this 42 m² flat in Legazpi neighbourhood of Madrid was to be able to resolve a high demand for storage space in a very small living area. With this purpose, we used the typological principle of the “Cabinet of Curiosities” or “Room of Wonders”; a typology of private room that achieved notoriety in Europe during the 16th-18th centuries, which was resolved on the basis of a wooden piece of furniture capable of displaying or hiding a series of objects collected throughout life, as can be seen in the pictorial works of Johann Georg Hainz "The Cabinet of Curiosities “ (1666), Domenico Remps ”Le Cabinet de Curiosités “ (1690) or in the engraving by Olaus Wormius ”The Room of Wonders ’ (1655); various fragments representative of a particular history, which, exposed or hidden, established a model for the organisation of space.

Cabinet House makes use of this principle of continuous furniture, resolved entirely in vaporized beech wood, which is capable of housing the natural entropy of domestic life; likewise, different mono-functional programmes of use, such as the kitchen or the bedroom, are incorporated into this programmatical strip, as well as a folding screen, providing flexibility of use and the possibility of transforming the space through the exercise of showing or concealing the elements that compose it, thus contributing the necessary share of uncertainty to domestic design.

Another fundamental aspect that we set as a challenge for the resolution of the project was to minimise the energy impact of the work and its environmental footprint, especially generated in the demolition process; and likewise, to point out the possible value of the building's pre-existences. This position led us to two material issues of interest. The first was the discovery of the building's original solid concrete slab, which was impeccably executed with wooden plank formwork, an increasingly uncommon solution in collective housing buildings due to the industrialisation of construction processes. The decision to leave it exposed allowed us to connect with the building's construction history and thus recover its original construction value, as well as gaining several centimetres in the interior height of the dwelling, which incorporated a considerable amount of cubic footage into the space.

The second question of interest, which ended up becoming a fundamental decision in terms of material expression for the work, was the presence of a marble tiling, both as flooring and as bathroom cladding, which was in perfect condition, so it seemed inappropriate to transform all this material simply into demolition waste. This is where a collective work arose, carried out in close collaboration with the company Mosaic Factory, to whom we proposed the idea of being able to recycle all the existing marble, sending it to their factory to be transformed into the main aggregate for a new terrazzo. The new material would then be used to pave the entire surface of the renovated flat, to clad the interior of the bathroom and also to make two bespoke worktops for bathroom and kitchen.

Recycled marble

The challenge was not a small one, as the material had to be carefully removed and cleaned beforehand so that it could be used for its intended purpose. This marble recycling process has meant a proposal committed to waste reduction, so that 40% of the total amount of demolition material generated has been reused, demonstrating that this type of initiative, with the commitment of architects, clients and companies producing construction materials, in this case with the valuable collaboration of Mosaic Factory, can be a significant step forward in the search of generating proposals that minimise environmental impact and promote circularity in the execution of a work, as well as offer new perspectives to address the process of renovating. In this way, Cabinet House, is resolved with the use of three main materials: the exposed ceramic thin brick, which forms the new partition walls; the vaporized beech wood, which characterises all the cabinet furniture; and the terrazzo, generated from the recycled marble of the dwelling in its original state.