Refurbished Heritage Apartment in Madrid Photographed by Juan Baraja.

It’s always a tricky thing, negotiating a contemporary brief with an existing heritage space. While many designers might obsessively refashion a square peg for a round hole, revealing as little evidence of this process as possible, Spanish architect Francisco Javier Eguiluz takes the opposite approach. Instead, he expresses some of the incongruous quirks that result from this process. Dog legged floor finishes, new rooms that straddle over two existing rooms and the deliberate expression of demolished walls. This is a space that does not try to paper over its past.

There’s potential for such a gesture to feel a little clumsy. Yet the sophisticated detailing combining a minimalist palette of white, walnut and marble, results in a space that feels polished and considered. This very honest alteration is a celebration of the apartment’s past and a pretty clever one at that.

Lesson of the day: Sometimes it’s not a bad idea to let go of those OCD tendencies.

Text by Ella Leoncio for Yellowtrace.

[Images courtesy of photographer Juan Baraja.]