Casa KAS is the renovation of a small apartment in Madrid. Three balconies opened onto a plaza along one façade, while the opposite side faced an interior courtyard. In between, the plan was highly compartmentalised, broken up into a dense sequence of small, closed rooms.

The project rests on two premises.

The first is spatial: opening up a larger, more fluid common area by removing several of the internal partitions, so it now wraps around in an L between the two bedrooms. The second is about honesty, toward the construction itself and the time it carries, and, in passing, a certain economy of means (adding no extra material when not needed). As timber beams and patches of exposed brick surfaced during the works, they were left visible rather than covered again, and the same went for the walls: wherever they showed years of overlapping paint and finishes, they were left as found rather than smoothed over.

All climate control equipment and storage is gathered into a single volume in a central position, from which it supplies every room, leaving the rest of the apartment free of visible machinery.