At dawn, Eduardo Mediero sees the tower of the La Visitación convent covered in an orange blush and, while the nuns who inhabit this building in the Madrid neighborhood of Chamberí gather to pray, the ringing of their bells penetrates their new apartment. “As soon as I entered I saw that he was going to be able to take out some spectacular windows from the two terraces that the house had before. The previous owner had closed them in a way that blocked the view of the convent,” says this 32-year-old architect. It is a fairly traditional panorama for the very modern design that the apartment presents inside, but it helps to evoke the historical references that Mediero says he took into account to conceive it. As he explains, the reform project started from his fascination with the studiolos or study rooms of the Italian Renaissance, in particular the wooden one in which – in a painting from 1475 that can be admired in the National Gallery in London – the Sicilian painter Antonello de Messina represented Saint Jerome immersed in the translation of the Bible . “A studiolo It was a type of room that Renaissance dukes and princes built in their palaces to withdraw from the bustle of daily life and dedicate themselves to their intellectual hobbies. Although there are many real examples in Italy, that kind of little house in the painting has always been my favorite,” he says.
To create his, the architect and his team from Hanghar, the studio he founded in 2021, knocked down the walls of the rooms in which the house was compartmentalized until the trapezoid that forms the floor was left empty. At the back of that open space they then installed the studiolo, a type of DM capsule furniture in dark green which, like the one occupied by Saint Jerome in the painting, is accessed by three steps. The structure contains Mediero’s bedroom while solving the storage of the home with the built-in closets, while the rest of the floor is made up of such an aseptic and uncluttered room (one kitchenette and a small bathroom are the only other spaces that open onto it) like the one that surrounds the saint’s cell in the painting. “I really liked the idea of a single room that meets basic domestic needs while leaving the rest of the floor empty. But I am not an anchorite: my intention is for all kinds of things to happen in the white space, from artist meetings to presentations, editorial productions and other small events.
A trolley Boby by Joe Colombo in yellow, the Luna chair by Casa Antillón or a lamp by Kauani are some of the pieces from the design collection with which Mediero has furnished that area of the apartment. The declaration of principles that Renaissance scholars revealed through the decoration of their studiolos In this case, it is completed with the use of unusual materials in the home such as the one chosen for the floor, covered in Pirelli rubber like that used in elevators or fingers of airports; or the galvanized steel profiles that, on the ceiling, reflect light and spread it within this avant-garde watchtower. “Outside the scope of residential construction there is a whole series of materials that we associate with others such as industrial materials, but that even on an aesthetic level can also work well in a house. The MDF boards with which the studioloFor example, they are that beautiful shade of green not because I have painted them that way, but because that is what they come with from the warehouse to indicate that they are water-repellent. Nothing that could be useful or beautiful escapes Mediero’s attention.
Outside the catalog of the residential sector, a domestic aspect has also been found in emergency lights (“I love their aesthetics”), those used in agricultural warehouses or, recently, in metal industrial sheds, which Hanghar has taken as a reference in the construction of a prefabricated home in Asturias, in collaboration with a metallurgical company. “You compare the photo of a work from the sixties with a current one and you see that, apart from the epis [uniformes de seguridad] Of the bricklayers, the construction continues to consist of a man laying bricks. It’s time to bet on other things!
To the studiolo de San Jerónimo says that he came in search of a way to distribute domestic space without the need for a hallway, an element that is taken for granted in most homes and which, on the contrary, both his house and others designed by Hanghar lack. His Round House, for example, won a COAM award in 2021 with a design that concatenates six generic rooms without a corridor. In this way, its inhabitants can use one as a bedroom and form a large living room with the rest, create other bedrooms if the number of people increases or give them any other configuration that best suits their needs, as they change. “How many families today correspond to that structure of two rooms for the children and a larger one for the parents at the end of the hallway that the promoters continue to promote?”
The ultimate goal that guides this unorthodox architect through books, museums and industrial warehouses is to stand up to real estate speculation, that force that, foreign to the experiments of his studiolo, makes the city that extends at its feet bustle, beyond the convent opposite. “The excessive commercialization of housing has made the spaces in our homes increasingly less flexible, with very specific uses that help direct them to a very specific audience and thus make them as profitable as possible. At Hanghar we explore poorly defined materials and spaces that better accommodate new domestic realities,” concludes Eduardo Mediero. Well amen.
