When the architect Ximena Zenteno Ladrón de Guevara gets a peek inside her neighbors’ apartments in Madrid, she feels a sense of joy about her own.
“When you see the typical kind of old apartment, where you can see the fridge and you can see, like, right away, everything,” she said, “I feel happier.”
What Ms. de Guevara gets when she opens the door to her own apartment is the element of surprise she was after when she commissioned the local architecture studio OOIIO to redesign the approximately 538-square-foot studio apartment in Madrid’s Carabanchel district. Once a working-class neighborhood, it has become an enclave for artists, writers and architects like Ms. de Guevara.
“You don’t expect this kind of apartment in a small place, in a neighborhood like this,” said Ms. de Guevara, 35, who is originally from Peru. “I like that. I wanted it to be a surprise.”
A surprise, indeed. The compact apartment, which is longer than it is wide and has just one window, is a vibrant blend of blush, berry, teal, turquoise and mustard yellow accents employed in curvaceous built-in furniture and nearly floor-to-ceiling ceramic tiles.
“We love colors in the studio,” said the architect Joaquín Millán Villamuelas, founder and creative director of OOIIO, which is also in Carabanchel. “We try to escape from the regular palette of grays, creamy beige. And we always try to go extra far.”
Ms. de Guevara bought the apartment after nearly a year back in Peru, where she had spent some time to work and to update her visa. The apartment was relatively new, but she didn’t like the interior. “I didn’t like the idea that all of them were the same,” she said.
She had been living in a larger apartment in Peru and had to adapt to living in a much smaller space. “I didn’t want to feel uncomfortable,” she said. “I wanted to make it special, so I wouldn’t feel that I’m just in a room.”
An architect who has worked mainly in the materials industry, Ms. de Guevara met Mr. Villamuelas a decade ago at an architectural event she organized and has collaborated on projects with OOIIO.
“He likes to do different things all the time,” Ms. de Guevara said, even though the projects OOIIO works on are often small and challenging. “I needed that.”
Playing with colors and materials in unexpected ways is a signature of OOIIO. Founded during the financial crisis, the firm learned how to make working with less look like more. “We are specializing in really getting our projects to a very low budget,” Mr. Villamuelas said. “And when you see it, you don’t feel that; you think that it’s even more expensive.”
That was the goal with Ms. de Guevara’s apartment, he said, where the idea was “to get something unique, but very low budget.” The completely customized apartment includes an Ikea kitchen personalized with wood panels in colors that match the apartment’s bright color scheme.
Tailor-made built-in furniture — including an arched nook with shelving and storage that houses a Murphy bed, geometric pieces that offer both form and function as a means to distinguish the living room, and a half-sun-shape panel in a corner in the kitchen that cleverly hides cables — is made from laminated low-cost laser-cut fiberboard in turquoise.
“But it’s not expensive because the materials are cheap,” said Mr. Villamuelas, who also noted that the studio had built up relationships with low-cost laser cutters through the years. “And because you can use these like regular catalog colors that no one uses — because who buys this crazy blue for your bedroom?” he joked, adding, “Everyone wants the typical oak, which is more expensive.”
The apartment reflects the architect’s prolific use of glazed ceramic tiles in bold colors. There’s berry in the bathroom, blush pink on the kitchen backsplash and the entire wall on one side, and teal running halfway up the wall from the curved entry to the newly installed window that opens onto the Juliet balcony on the other side (not to mention the floors).
The style speaks to OOIIO’s main tool for achieving a distinctive look on a low budget. “Just using styles that you can buy in any material shop, but using them with a different way of playing with color, locating them in a special location where you usually don’t see it,” Mr. Villamuelas said. “Then you can get something different.”
Completed in less than a year, the renovation cost 32,650 euros (about $35,210, including the loose furniture, which OOIIO selected to complete the look).
Surprisingly, Ms. de Guevara said she was “not that colorful, actually.” After a moment of hesitation, however, she let the studio do its thing.
“I didn’t expect all the mixture and the match,” she said. “So it was kind of like, ‘OK; this is a lot, let me breathe for a while.’
“And then I was like, ‘OK, I trust you, so why not.’ In the end, the tiles and the color are the essence of the apartment.”
