A 1970s flat in Valencia arrived with seven small rooms and a corridor that ate a third of the plan. The owners, both working from home, asked for somewhere to sit that did not feel like a passage to somewhere else.
Estudio Marfil removed most of the internal walls and replaced them with a single thick joinery spine, finished in limewashed pine and detailed so that its doors disappear into the grain. The living area now opens off that spine rather than off a hallway. You see it edge-on first: a pale vertical plane, then the room beyond it, then the window. The photograph was taken from that threshold, and the name of the project comes from it.
The sofa is custom, built in two curved sections that read as one continuous form from the entry and separate into a chaise and a three-seater once you are inside. Its cover is an undyed wool bouclé, chosen because the studio wanted the upholstery to be the lightest object in the room rather than the heaviest. Two round oak tables of different heights sit in front of it. A dark stone sphere on the taller one is the only object in the space that is not the colour of sand.
Glazing runs the width of the far wall, screened by floor-to-ceiling sheer curtains on a recessed track. The curtains are never fully drawn back. Valencia light in July is direct and unkind to pale timber, so the fabric works as a permanent filter, turning the window into an even panel of brightness. Ceiling coves along both long walls carry the same light back into the room after dark.
The floor is engineered oak in wide planks, laid in the direction of the view. A vertical slot in the joinery holds four shelves and nothing much on them. The studio argued for keeping it near-empty and the clients agreed for the first year.
Colour was reduced to three values of the same warm neutral: the pine spine, the plaster ceiling, the oak floor. The jury described the result as a room that photographs quietly and behaves well, and singled out the curved sofa as the element that keeps the openness from turning cold.
Estudio Marfil works from a converted bakery in Ruzafa, Valencia. Partners Clara Benet and Íñigo Sáez met on a heritage-restoration project and set up together in 2016. The office takes on around five interiors a year and turns down anything that requires demolition it considers unnecessary. Both partners teach one day a week at the local architecture school. Their material palette has stayed within lime plaster, untreated pine, oak and wool since the first project, which they describe less as a signature than as a way of avoiding decisions they have already made once. Benet handles the drawing work and Sáez the site; they have never employed more than three people at once and have said they do not intend to.