Masquespacio Designs a 60m² Valencia Showroom Where the Building’s 1800 History Is the Most Important Material

Masquespacio has designed the Maora ceramic showroom in Valencia around a single premise: that handmade tiles deserve to be exhibited as excavated finds rather than retail inventory, transforming a 60-square-metre historic ground floor dating to 1800 into a space where every constraint — inclined walls, low ceilings, scarce light — becomes a design decision.

The commission came from Amparo, founder of Maora, and her children, who entrusted Ana Hernández and Christophe Penasse with a brief that was unusually clear in its hierarchy: the ceramics were to be the absolute protagonist, and the space was to be built in service of that. The building at Calle Montornés 11 — a ground floor in the heart of Valencia’s old town, completed in June 2025 — presented every condition that a conventional showroom fitout would have treated as a liability.

The studio’s relationship with Maora predates this commission. Masquespacio and the Valencian artisan ceramics producer had previously collaborated on a ceramic collection, and that familiarity shapes how the showroom operates: as a curated dialogue between a specific body of objects and the space built to house them, rather than a neutral backdrop waiting to be filled. Amparo, Maora’s founder, and her children again entrusted Ana Hernández and Christophe Penasse with the brief — to design a space that placed Maora ceramic production at the absolute centre of every decision.

The guiding concept, “Fragments of Tradition,” is not a stylistic direction so much as a spatial argument. The building’s history, compressed into its inclined walls, limited ceiling height, and restricted natural light, is treated not as a set of problems to solve but as conditions to narrate. Each glazed tile on the walls is presented as a stratum — something uncovered rather than applied, a fragment of a longer material continuity rather than a decorative finish. The inclined walls, rather than being regularised, are integrated as traces of accumulated time.

The floor anchors the reading. Unglazed terracotta ceramic covers the ground plane, punctuated by lines of glazed pieces — a combination that evokes unfinished earth and fired surface simultaneously, grounding the space in the language of craft without resorting to period reproduction. Above floor level, the walls are clad in glazed pieces of varying sizes, arranged in a sequence that mirrors the range of Maora’s production rather than imposing a single typological order. The wall surface reads as both sample archive and spatial finish.

The colour palette holds the composition without competing with it. Ranging from warm terracotta to pale beige, the tonal register is deliberately restrained — a neutral field that makes the chromatic variety and material specificity of Maora’s ceramics legible rather than absorbed into the room’s atmosphere. It is an editorial choice as much as a design one: the palette asks the tiles to speak for themselves.

“The concept of ‘Fragments of Tradition’ arose from the very essence of the space and Maora’s ceramics,” said Ana Hernández, art director of Masquespacio. “We wanted to create a dialogue between the palpable history of the building and the artisan tradition that Maora represents. Each ceramic piece becomes a fragment of that history, exhibited in a contemporary way that invites you to discover its intrinsic value and beauty.”

The inclined walls — an architectural anomaly that a less committed intervention might have corrected — become the showroom’s most specific spatial feature. Masquespacio treats them as built equivalents of the geological strata the ceramic pieces themselves reference. “The inclined walls were transformed into a symbol of the layers of time,” Hernández continued, “where ceramics emerge as a precious find.” The decision to work with this feature rather than against it reflects the studio’s consistent approach to historic fabric: read what the building is already doing, then design in relation to that reading. It is the same spatial intelligence Masquespacio brought to its Egeo Souvlaki project in Madrid, where a regional cultural identity was absorbed into a spatial concept without being reduced to decoration.

The project sits within a consistent strand of Masquespacio’s practice — one that uses interior design Valencia commissions to make specific arguments about how commercial spaces can carry cultural weight. At Maora, the content is Valencian ceramic heritage, and the proposition is correspondingly precise: a 60m² room that operates as both showroom and statement about what handmade objects require from the spaces built around them. The brief demanded that the ceramics be the protagonist; the design responded by making the room their setting in the most literal sense available — walls, floor, and ceiling all become surfaces on which ceramic showroom design is redefined as curation rather than display.

The most specific claim the Maora showroom makes is also its least obvious one: that constraint is not a problem but a material. The building’s low ceiling, inclined walls, and limited light define exactly the conditions under which Maora’s tiles are most legible — surfaces close enough to touch, layered densely enough to read as a collection, lit indirectly enough that glaze and texture matter more than scale. Masquespacio did not overcome the building’s limitations at Calle Montornés. They used them.

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Maora Showroom by Masquespacio | Location: Calle Montornés 11, Valencia, Spain — Year: 2025 — Key materials: unglazed terracotta ceramic, glazed ceramic tiles, beige plaster