Casa AMR, a private residence in a protected enclave of central Madrid, restores the clarity of an altered house through restraint alone — the result of Madrid-based studio DIIR. The 120-square-meter house (1,292 sq ft) had accumulated decades of partitions and additions before the studio intervened. DIIR’s approach was to strip those layers back and let the building’s own structure set the terms for everything built afterward.
The intervention began by fully opening the house’s structural bays, a first move meant to recover the clarity of the original residential typology before any new decision was made. Rather than imposing a new plan on the site, the studio worked to expose what was already there — an approach consistent with DIIR’s broader interest in adaptive reuse of existing buildings, treated here as the starting point for unlocking the house’s potential rather than an obstacle to design around. A comparable instinct shaped PDLL70 House by Plutarco, another Madrid renovation where a derelict structure was read as a foundation to build from rather than erase.
At the center of the plan, a courtyard that had been enclosed over time became the project’s key strategic move. Restoring this Madrid courtyard renovation allowed natural light to reach every room in the house while re-establishing the spatial relationship between what are, in effect, two separate volumes.
The main volume, facing the street, holds the house’s primary living spaces in a Madrid private residence built around clear separation of use. Its ground floor is conceived as a single open-plan area for living, dining, and cooking, while the upper level contains the more private program, with two bedrooms set apart from the household’s shared life below.
Access to the secondary volume runs through the courtyard itself, physically separating it from the main house before a visitor even steps inside. It houses a workshop on the ground floor and a home office above, a split that keeps domestic and work-related activity in distinct territory without requiring either to compromise on light or access.
A sequence of stone-framed openings defines one of the project’s clearest architectural signatures, marking the transitions between spaces throughout the house. These repeated frames reinforce the building’s longitudinal axis, subtly define the edges of the courtyard, and articulate how each room relates to the next — a quiet structural rhythm running the length of the plan.
The staircase functions as the house’s central architectural element, built as a sculptural stainless steel staircase with enough spatial presence to organize the vertical axis of the entire building. Made from 5mm stainless steel plates, it was the result of a precise structural exercise: detailed to avoid touching the surrounding walls, it reads as a freestanding object suspended within the space rather than a fixed piece of construction. The same appetite for load-bearing elements treated as sculpture runs through JOTAJOTA+’s recent Madrid apartment, where a single custom joinery structure was built to carry the full weight of the plan’s organization.
Timber joinery plays a role throughout the project that goes beyond storage or partition, appearing across both interior and exterior spaces. It introduces warmth and texture as a deliberate contrast to an otherwise restrained material palette, keeping the house from reading as austere despite the discipline applied everywhere else.
What DIIR describes as a calm, neutral architectural framework is designed to be completed and personalized over time, through the lives of the people who will inhabit it — a courtyard reopened to daylight, and a staircase suspended without touching a single wall.
Casa AMR by DIIR | Location: Madrid, Spain — Year: 2025 — Key materials: 5mm stainless steel staircase, stone-framed openings, timber joinery