Colonia 722

A heritage building in the historic centre, inhabited once again

Colonia sits in the La Catedral neighbourhood, in the district of La Candelaria, in Bogotá's historic centre. The street says it all: on one side a mid-century brick building with hanging balconies, on the other a single-storey house with clay-tile roof, timber windows and a continuous balcony, and at the end the eastern mountains closing the view under the cold, shifting light of the savanna. The project does not arrive at an empty plot: it arrives at a building already standing there, within the protected area of the Special Management and Protection Plan for the Historic Centre.

That is why the commission began with understanding rather than drawing. It included a full heritage assessment — the building's history within its urban context, its state of conservation and diagnosis, its valuation and the resulting intervention criteria — and from that diagnosis came the decisions: what to keep, what to upgrade and how far the new work could go. Authorisation was filed as a preliminary design with the District Institute of Cultural Heritage, and the tourist-accommodation use rests on Resolution 092 of 2023.

What is built keeps its memory in plain sight. In the inner courtyard and the lounge the old brick and lime-rendered walls remain, cracks exposed, lit by wall fittings and accompanied by suspended planters; the ground floor becomes a collective level — lobby, lounge, co-working, games room, gym and laundry — from which a corridor of numbered doors begins. The rooms are compact, some double-height with the bed on a mezzanine behind a screen of circular perforations, and on the roof a pool under a timber pergola looks out over the rooftops of the centre.