In a 90-square-metre (970-square-foot) apartment inside a 1965 Logroño building, D I — S diriondostudio exposed structural concrete beams up to 50 centimetres (20 inches) deep instead of hiding them behind a dropped ceiling, and gained rooms with ceilings up to 270 centimetres (106 inches) high in the process. The Logroño-based studio, led by architect David Domínguez Iriondo, reorganized the unit — known as Vivienda GV65 — into a day-and-night split built around the new owners’ brief for two bedrooms and two full bathrooms. The result treats a structural condition the original 1965 plan had spent decades concealing as the new layout’s defining feature.
The building itself offered little beyond its address: a 1965 residential block with a terrace facing Logroño’s central Gran Vía and every other room opening onto interior courtyards. Its floor plan — unchanged since construction, according to original drawings held in the city’s municipal archive — once routed occupants through a windowless entrance hall and a long, dark corridor to reach three undersized bedrooms. The kitchen and the apartment’s single bathroom sat at the corridor’s far end, both facing inward, leaving only the living and dining rooms with any real connection to the outside.
Years of vacancy had left the unit deteriorated by the time diriondostudio took it on, its heavy compartmentalization compounded by low ceilings that concealed the building’s structural beams and by a proliferation of mochetas — the reveals and corner returns typical of mid-century Spanish construction — that added visual clutter without adding function. It’s a starting condition close to what Medioestudio faced reworking a 55-square-metre Madrid apartment: a small, dated footprint with little to recommend it beyond location.
Rather than lower every ceiling to hide the concrete structure uniformly, as the 1965 design had, diriondostudio built the new layout around the exposed concrete beams themselves. “We decided to incorporate the beams into the design of the new layout instead of covering them, and that way we achieved rooms with ceilings up to 270 centimetres (106 inches) high,” the studio said. Where the beams didn’t intrude, ceiling height could rise; where they did, the layout simply worked around them.
Natural light was the layout’s other constraint: of the unit’s seven windows, five face interior courtyards and only two open onto the main street-facing terrace. A high-gloss enamel finish on the ceilings bounces what daylight there is deeper into each room, while a single continuous microquartz flooring system, run without transition strips from one end of the apartment to the other, removes the visual breaks that would otherwise shrink each space.
The new plan splits the apartment into a day-and-night layout — kitchen, dining and living room combined in one open volume with terrace access, street views and a guest toilet, set against two bedrooms with full en-suite bathrooms built with separate toilet and shower cabins, lit only by the interior-facing courtyard windows. Relocating the kitchen into the day zone, adjacent to the terrace, meant rerouting the unit’s plumbing and services through a floor plan that hadn’t been designed for it.
A single accent color — a sage green that reads more grey or more green depending on the light — runs through the apartment, chosen alongside walnut wood and brushed stainless steel in the kitchen and Carrara marble bathrooms. Skirting boards and mouldings were dropped entirely, walls and floors reduced to smooth, continuous planes — a similar instinct to dissolve conventional partitions drives Bardo’s recent Madrid renovation, though there the walls themselves were replaced rather than simplified. With little in the existing GV65 building worth preserving, diriondostudio treated the shell as a blank canvas rather than working around inherited detail.
Furniture, not decoration, carries the apartment’s visual weight: a Roly Poly armchair by Faye Toogood for Driade, Ant chairs by Arne Jacobsen for Fritz Hansen, and a USM Haller sideboard sit alongside a deliberately mixed lighting scheme — Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni’s Toio for Flos, Tommaso Cimini’s Daphine Terra for Lumina, Bonderup & Thorup’s Semi Pendant for Gubi, Miguel Milá’s metal basket lamp for Santa & Cole, Charlotte Perriand’s Applique à Volet Pivotant for Nemo, and Jasper Morrison’s Glo-Ball for Flos.
A single graphic piece is the apartment’s only purely decorative object: Prinse I by Ángela Suárez, from Galería Belmonte, sits apart from a furniture selection chosen to double as the room’s visual content in its place. “I feel this is a project that manages to get the most out of the existing space and structure, with a very neutral, refined aesthetic that at the same time carries a strong visual impact,” the studio said, citing Donald Judd-inspired minimalism among its reference points alongside a loosely art-gallery sensibility.
The one relic that survived the renovation isn’t part of the apartment at all: it’s the set of 1965 drawings retrieved from Logroño’s municipal archive, the same plans diriondostudio used to confirm how little of the original layout could stay. Everything those drawings once described — the windowless vestibule, the long dark corridor, the three cramped bedrooms — is gone from Vivienda GV65 today, surviving only on paper in a municipal filing cabinet.
Vivienda GV65 by D I — S diriondostudio | Location: Gran Vía Juan Carlos I, Logroño, La Rioja, Spain — Key materials: sage green lacquer, walnut wood, brushed stainless steel, Carrara marble, continuous microquartz flooring