Grandmother in Latex: Archive for Space Reworks a Madrid Apartment.

In Madrid’s Malasaña, where ornate old-world façades rub shoulders with vintage shops and late-night bars, Archive for Space has renovated an 80-square-metre apartment that refuses to resolve its own contradictions. Known as Jesús del Valle, the project runs on a tension the London and Mallorca-based studio calls “traditional punk”—rebellious but romantic, subversive but grounded.

Rather than smoothing over the friction between the building’s early-twentieth-century bones and its own contemporary gestures, co-founders Arabella Maza and Stephen Maginn lean straight into it. Restored plaster cornicing, decorative ceiling medallions and original timber shutters stay legible, while reflective stainless-steel surfaces and sharp pops of red and black deliberately unsettle the gentleness of the period shell.

The brief was a tall order: a single home that also works as office, entertaining space and crash pad for visiting friends, all within a long, narrow 1900s footprint. Major structural intervention was kept to a minimum. Instead, the studio reorganised through planning and material continuity—living areas pushed towards the street-facing balconies and shifting Spanish light, bedrooms folded around the quieter internal patio.

The whole palette pivoted on a discovery. Beneath a layer of carpet, the team uncovered the apartment’s original terracotta flooring, its earthy tones becoming the conceptual anchor of the scheme. Restored and sympathetically infilled, the tiles shift from checkerboard in the kitchen to diamond formations elsewhere, grounding the interior in colour and history. Pale yellow walls do the rest, catching Madrid’s mellow light and warming the narrow plan.

At its centre sits a bespoke masonry kitchen—a “de obra” build where reflective steel worktops meet gathered linen cabinet skirting, severity and softness in constant dialogue. A large circular extractor hood, designed by the studio, reads more as objet d’art than infrastructure.

Elsewhere, grandma chic does the emotional work: a vintage floral occasional chair from Pamono, a cross-stitched wall hanging of oversized roses standing in for a headboard, red lacquered side tables by Colin King for Zara Home. The bathrooms swing the other way, all glossy black tile, chrome and veined Calacatta marble.

“We wanted the apartment to feel slightly provocative at times,” says Maza. “We kept referring to it as a grandmother in latex.”It’s a fitting line for a home that treats its own contradictions as the point—poetic, a little eccentric, and quietly assured.

[Images courtesy of Archive for Space. Photography by Enric Badrinas.]