Project material
- Category
- Bespoke Design
- Typology
- Interior design and renovation
- Year
- 2015
- Area
- 150 m²
- Program
- Residential renovation
- Location
- Bogotá
- Neighborhood
- El Urapán
- City
- Bogotá, Cundinamarca
- Status
- Portfolio
A module that puts an apartment's inherited geometry back in order
El Urapán is the full remodelling of an apartment in an existing building in the El Urapán neighbourhood of Bogotá. The windows look into tree canopies and take in the cold diffuse light of the savanna, the kind that changes several times in a single afternoon. The original plan, by contrast, offered no help: it came with a broken geometry, angles that never quite met and a hall that distributed without resolving anything.
The remodelling does not chase those angles, it absorbs them. A compact module — a containing cube — gathers the kitchen, the laundry, the bathroom serving the secondary bedrooms and the service room with its own bathroom into a single body. By concentrating the services, circulation between the social and private zones is left free and continuous, and the kitchen opens onto the living and dining area through a large opening that turns the counter into a bar. That module is, literally, the piece that articulates the plan.
The materials work in favour of the same idea. Exposed clay brick wraps the cube and lets it read as a solid volume inside the apartment; dark timber joinery resolves sliding doors, bookcases and the walk-in closet; laminate flooring runs continuously through the whole home, and a linear gas fireplace, set on a stone and pebble ledge, anchors the living room. The project was handed over with a user manual: specifications, record drawings, equipment data sheets and a list of suppliers.
More about the project›
The interior design of El Urapán focuses the intervention on harmoniously articulating the home's activities and making efficient use of the available area by reconfiguring its spaces.
Through a cube containing the kitchen and service areas, the proposal resolves both the rationalization of the geometry and the hierarchical element that sets the architectural language and the choice of finishes.
The remodeling seeks to optimize circulation, provide the missing service areas and connect the spaces more effectively; to achieve it, some walls were reconfigured and openings were introduced to link the kitchen with the social area.
Concentrate in order to free up.
The before-and-after diagrams tell the whole process. In the "before", kitchen, bathrooms and service room appear scattered along an irregular strip that forced every trip through the hall; the social zone reached the dining room already split. The remodelling groups all those uses into a single rectangle and aligns it on new axes, so the apartment's broken geometry ends up contained in one piece. Then came the works: demolishing the marked walls, setting out the new ones and rebuilding the interior in brick, joinery and finishes. What the photographs show today — the brick cube standing in the middle of the social zone — is that diagram built.
- 01 / 03
Articulation of geometries: above, the original plan with its disjointed geometry; below, the plan ordered on new axes, with the articulating module marked.
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Setting out the walls: in red what was demolished, in blue what was built. The remodelling changes the interior skeleton, not just the finishes.
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Articulation of uses: the poor relationship between the social areas in the "before" becomes a coherent sequence, with access to the private bathroom and a walk-in closet resolved in the bedroom area.
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