When Arana and Ventosa first encountered the three-storey property, it had been abandoned for years and was in a state of severe disrepair. Rather than restoring the house to a specific historical condition, the architects approached it as a blank canvas while remaining attentive to the era in which it was built. Research into modernist villas from the 1930s informed a design language that draws inspiration from figures such as Robert Mallet-Stevens and Piero Portaluppi without ever slipping into nostalgia.

Throughout, a vocabulary of curves, circles and graphic motifs lends the house a distinctive visual identity. Arched openings, rounded corners, cylindrical volumes and circular cut-outs recur from room to room, softening transitions and establishing a sense of continuity. Polka dots, grids and stripes appear across furniture, joinery and surfaces, introducing moments of playfulness, while carefully placed flashes of colour, including the studio's recurring use of "unexpected red", animate everything from the entrance canopy and custom furniture pieces to light switches and decorative details.

Nowhere is the studio's material confidence clearer than in the kitchen, where five principal materials are made to coexist without hierarchy. Two woods set the tone: cherry, chosen for its reddish warmth in place of the predictable oak, and pine stained a dark Danish blue. A polygonal terrazzo island was cast specially for the project, the floor laid in a second terrazzo that recalls the porticoes of Milan, and the splashback tiled in blue with red grouting. Overhead, a custom installation of organically blown glass pendants hangs from slender cords, their elongated forms somewhere between vessels and glass sausages, a lighthearted counterweight to all that mass below.

On the lower ground floor, which opens onto an unusually large interior courtyard, a second living area pairs a dining space with a family room built around the STV sofa, designed by Studio Plutarco for Rabadán with nothing more complicated in mind than watching a film together. Multi-tiered curtains lend the room a quiet theatricality, while a square red mosaic wall echoes the sofa's striped upholstery. Outside, the courtyard functions as a verdant extension of the living spaces, combining striped red and brown paving, lush planting, a blue-tiled barbecue and a green mosaic-clad plunge pool into what the architects describe as a small climatic oasis.

What makes this house compelling is that its expressive character never feels arbitrary, with every colour, pattern and object contributing to a larger architectural narrative. In an era when many homes aspire to serenity through reduction, Studio Plutarco proposes an alternative vision where comfort emerges through richness, individuality and delight.