Casa JAM replaces every door along its central corridor with a floor-to-ceiling sliding panel, so the apartment’s private rooms can widen, shrink, or disappear entirely depending on how the panels are positioned. Designed by gon architects for Toni, an aerospace project manager, and his dog Kea, the 78-square-metre (840 sq ft) renovation occupies the top floor of a residential building in Madrid’s Argüelles neighborhood. The brief asked for two things at once: a home to live inside like an artwork, and a definitive place of residence.
The building sits within the 19th-century grid of Madrid’s Castro Plan, which gives Argüelles its large deep blocks, interior courtyards, and generously proportioned apartments. gon architects, the Madrid studio led by Gonzalo Pardo, has worked this same top-floor condition before — the practice’s approach to attic and upper-level light is detailed in urdesign’s own roundup of their rooftop conversions, and Casa JAM’s east-facing terrace continues that interest in treating the uppermost floor as its own design opportunity.
Toni’s brief was precise and ambitious in equal measure: to inhabit the interior of an artwork, and to design a home built to last. The apartment needed to hold both an aerospace project manager’s daily routine and a pop-culture enthusiast’s sensibility — a combination the original layout did nothing to support.
The original plan was a tube apartment 18 metres (59 ft) long and barely 3.5 metres (11.5 ft) wide at its narrowest point, organized around a dark corridor running along the party wall. That corridor logic has a long architectural pedigree — historian John Thorpe’s 1587 Beaufort House is an early example of the type — and it has always served the same purpose: segregating rooms and controlling movement between them, prioritizing hygiene and hierarchy over how people actually move through a home.
gon architects treats that corridor as the problem to be solved rather than a fixed constraint. Because access to the apartment happens at one end, forcing entry through its most private area, the studio introduced a large diagonal that restructures circulation across the whole plan. The move draws on Robin Evans’s theories on domestic connectivity, in which doors and thresholds stop functioning as barriers of separation and instead become mediators — points of encounter and ambiguity rather than control.
The corridor itself becomes a system of floor-to-ceiling sliding doors, each executed in a different material, texture, and color. Depending on how these movable filters are positioned, rooms connect or separate, compress or expand — turning what was once a fixed sequence of isolated rooms into something closer to a living, mutable organism that adjusts to Toni’s daily rituals.
Four volumes articulate this shift from intimate to collective. A Klein blue box at the entrance holds the bathroom; a second volume, wrapped in warm wooden frames and ribbed glass, houses the bedroom and dressing room; a third, green, contains the shower; and the fourth — a yellow kitchen — functions simultaneously as the household’s busiest room and a panoptic device positioned to observe the shared spaces beyond it.
Beyond the kitchen’s yellow ceramic filter, the plan opens into one shared room unifying dining, living, and a small workspace, built around furniture treated as architectural infrastructure rather than objects added afterward. The sequence culminates on the terrace — conceived as an exterior room open to the Madrid sky, and the final move in dissolving the boundary between the domestic interior and the city outside.
The panoptic framing of the kitchen is the detail worth sitting with longer than the rest. A yellow volume built explicitly to let one resident observe every other room in the apartment is a strange feature to install in the name of freedom and multiplicity — it’s less a rejection of the corridor’s old logic of control than a redesign of who gets to hold it, which is a different achievement than the one Casa JAM claims for itself.
Casa JAM by gon architects | Location: Argüelles, Madrid, Spain — Year: 2026 — Key materials: oak wood framing, ribbed glass, ceramic tile, painted volumes