In the historic center of Lastres, a former whaling village on the coast of Asturias, Madrid-based architecture practice Extrarradio Estudio gutted a traditional house down to its masonry and timber skeleton, then re-inhabited the resulting void with freestanding furniture volumes that take over the work walls used to do. The 70-square-meter house had accumulated partitions and lowered ceilings over the decades, darkening rooms that once had direct views to the sea. The result treats the existing structure itself as the project’s expressive backbone, rather than something to be covered over.
A fundamental clearing set the terms for everything that followed at Casa Ballenero, in the historic center of Lastres. All interior partitions were removed and the timber floor structures exposed and reinforced, restoring the full height of the main floor, improving cross-ventilation, and reopening both interior sightlines and views toward the water — the exposed timber structure now doing the expressive work the walls once did.
Infrastructure as furniture replaced the walls Extrarradio Estudio had just removed. A series of freestanding infrastructure-furniture volumes now integrate storage, kitchen, bathroom, and staircase, functioning as filters that organize the program without cutting the house back into separate rooms — a strategy the studio has returned to before, distributing similar server-like volumes through the Corrala flat of Casa Rivet in Madrid.
A single continuous space is how the house now reads, with different degrees of privacy handled by the placement and height of these volumes rather than by fixed partitions dividing the plan outright.
Soft blue and white tones define the furniture itself, chosen to amplify natural light and set the dark timber beams of the original structure into visual relief rather than competing with them.
The kitchen and staircase in this Lastres, Asturias renovation share one of these volumes, conceived as a light piece that holds two functions without breaking the visual continuity of the space around it.
The bathroom volume takes a different approach to the same problem: it secures privacy without rising to the ceiling, preserving the sense of height that defines the main floor — a solution close to the one Extrarradio Estudio applied at Prado Toro in the Sierra de Gredos, where functional volumes were also kept below the ceiling line to protect a continuous interior.
Wet areas are finished in durable materials and neutral colors, deliberately restrained so they don’t pull attention away from the exposed structure that anchors the rest of the house.
The more contestable claim in Casa Ballenero is that a house can gain privacy and program without gaining a single new wall — a position that only holds up because none of these functional volumes actually reach the ceiling, a constraint some clients would read as a comfort trade-off rather than a design virtue.
Casa Ballenero by Extrarradio Estudio | Location: Lastres, Asturias, Spain — Year: 2026 — Key materials: exposed timber structure, masonry walls, blue and white lacquered furniture