Paula Ábalos arquitectura reworks a chalet adosado in Majadahonda without erasing the generations of family life it has already held. The Madrid-based studio’s renovation of Casa Boa sidesteps a full spatial overhaul in favor of a more precise instrument: color. What results is a house that reads less like a blank restart than a negotiation between what was inherited and what a family needs now.
Rather than reorganizing the layout, Paula Ábalos arquitectura found little reason to challenge the home’s existing distribution. Casa Boa, an inherited family home in Majadahonda, belonged to different generations of the same family before passing to current owners Concha, Ana and Miguel, and the studio treated that continuity as a value to preserve rather than a constraint to design around.
The ground floor absorbed most of the intervention for this Majadahonda townhouse renovation, its internal barriers removed to create a single open, light-filled volume oriented toward the family garden. The shift reoriented the renovation’s focus toward how the household actually gathers, rather than how the original rooms were divided.
A pastel-yellow kitchen anchors that shift, pulling daylight and the garden view into what was previously a more closed-off room. The color sits in dialogue with a new blue-toned extractor hood, painted to match the home’s original staircase railings — repainted rather than replaced, the one fixture that keeps a visible thread to the house’s earlier identity running through the new scheme.
An oak cabinet does double duty at the edge of the kitchen, concealing the refrigerator while adding storage and marking the transition point toward the staircase — a quiet piece of joinery doing spatial work that a wall no longer does.
Surfaces throughout draw on a single material logic: a broken white 5×5 tile runs across both walls and floor, its vanilla-toned grout softening what could otherwise read as a clinical grid. It’s a restrained backdrop, built to let color make the louder decisions elsewhere in the house.
A different material register takes hold at the counter, where a terrazzo countertop from Mosaista, worked in ochre, amber and almond tones, becomes the room’s most textured gesture. A similar instinct — using one saturated material to punctuate an otherwise neutral base — drives Midori Arquitectura’s 30-square-metre Madrid attic, where color is used just as precisely to organize rather than decorate a compact home.
A softer register closes the palette, with an Ondarreta furniture collection selected in blues, amber and terracotta to sit alongside the kitchen’s own tones without competing with them — a selection built to balance the composition rather than dominate it.
A handful of playful additions from IKEA’s PS line round out the mix, the kind of detail that keeps a renovation this considered from feeling overly resolved. It’s that last, unfussy layer — furniture that doesn’t match so much as get along — that ends up defining Casa Boa more than any single material choice: a house still comfortable holding a little imperfection, the same way it always has.
Casa Boa by Paula Ábalos arquitectura | Location: Majadahonda, Madrid, Spain — Year: 2025–2026 — Key materials: broken white 5×5 tile, vanilla-toned grout, terrazzo countertop (Mosaista), oak cabinetry