When Álvaro Madrigal, a dancer with the Spanish National Dance Company, and Telmo Chacón went on their first date in 2021, Álvaro mentioned he was planning to buy a place in Madrid. “It was like ‘I’m looking for a house’ and ‘Well, I’m just trying to have dinner with you,’ ” jokes Telmo, a Zara Home business manager.

The couple were still going strong by the time one of Álvaro’s colleagues, who’d just renovated a home in the southeastern Entrevías neighborhood, told him that the property next door was going on the market later that year. The upside: The two-level townhouse was affordable, despite Madrid’s skyrocketing housing prices. (The historically working-class neighborhood of Entrevías is cut off from central Madrid by a series of railway tracks—hence its name, “between railways”—and has only recently started attracting a wave of young creatives.) The downside? Álvaro dreamed of a light-filled home with a terrace, and the house he toured—part of a block of nearly century-old townhomes built for construction workers raising the nearby dry port—was “dark” and “humid,” he says.

$128,625 Existing Building	$13,263 Foundation	$18,289 Structural
$5,726 Finishes	$8,674 Electrical	$6,941 Plumbing
$3,344 HVAC Equipment	$8,144 Kitchen	$9,579 Millwork
$2,231 Appliances	$15,675 Windows & Glazing	$3,597 Metalwork
$4,410 Furnishings & Decor	$3,528 Permitting	$23,822 Contractor Fee
$17,338 Architect Fee	$22,145 Other Labor	$10,601 Demolition
$3,138 Waste Removal
Grand Total: $309,070

Álvaro’s sister put him in contact with her childhood friend Antonio Mora, an architect who in 2020 cofounded Madrid firm Studio.Noju with his husband, Eduardo Tazón. “It was a small space that needed a lot of change, so it became one of those projects that we really needed to make the most out of every square inch,” Tazón says.

The architects knew they’d need to make smart interventions to brighten up the townhouse’s interior, but during demolition they unlocked a new set of roadblocks: “When we started to open up the floor to see how the foundations were made, we discovered that basically there were no foundations,” says Mora. “The soil was so humid that it was like a pantano—a swamp.”

“The ceramic walls are the same outside. It gives an impression of the outside inside and the inside outside.”
—Álvaro Madrigal, resident

After they built a new foundation to fix the home’s humidity issues, Mora and Tazón began working on the darkness. “We’re very psychologically attuned to how lighting affects us,” Tazón says. To bring natural light into the ground level from the back courtyard, they rearranged the plan, removing a load-bearing wall and repositioning the staircase to allow light and air to flow all the way to the entrance. Walls of glass doors connect the courtyard to the kitchen and living area, where the couple host friends and have Sunday dinners. To partially divide spaces without blocking light and air circulation, the architects added floor-to-ceiling ceramic lattices—a material nod to another one of Álvaro’s passions: pottery.

Upstairs, sliding doors create a sense of privacy between the bedroom, bathroom, and a multipurpose nook that looks out through glass doors over the courtyard. The couple often keep the doors open. “You always feel some kind of breeze going on,” Telmo says. “Almost always.”

Though Álvaro bought the home, he and Telmo worked together to make it theirs. While the unanticipated cost of building a new foundation carved a chunk out of the budget, Telmo says, “I think we managed to get what we were dreaming of.”

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Studio.Noju / @studio.noju

Builder: DosPlanos / @dosplanos_

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Striking Ceramic Screens Take a Cramped Madrid Townhouse From Dark to Delightful for $309K