CASA MELÓN

• Architects

The original house, located in the historic Vistabella neighborhood in the city of Murcia and dating back to the 1940s, had a compartmentalized layout with rooms and hallways that met the needs of many of the family organizations that were given houses in the neighborhood during those years.
When we came across the house, on the top floor of the building, we knew about the spatial possibilities that would open up by removing the continuous false ceiling that hid the generous volume available. From that moment on, Casa Melón became a process of thinking, drawing, rehearsing, maturing, and constructing, detail by detail, many of our concerns and working concepts in the studio.

As an essential premise, we sought to ensure that the new house expressed the identity of its occupants, met their specific needs, and enabled an open, creative, flexible, and uncomplicated way of living in the space. We wanted to be explicit in one conviction: every house is unique and personal.

Sculpting the entire available volume offered us opportunities that are rare in a downtown apartment, such as the creation of a floating walkway that provides access to the library, reading corner, and a bedroom/study with an en-suite bathroom, a level accessed by a staircase clad in white sheet metal behind the custom-designed woodwork, which changes to natural wood on the first few steps, widening on the first step to form a bench-chest, inviting us to climb up.

The planned layout amplifies the available space by multiplying visual relationships and extending perspective backgrounds, seeking long cross views inside and creating a new luminous interior landscape connected to the exterior landscape of the river and the leafy trees of the park facing southeast.

In other words, we sought to move from a corridor to a promenade.
To achieve this fluidity and spatial continuity, we have made decisions such as placing the retractable kitchen in a location that could have been reduced to a “passageway or mere circulation” space, transforming it into an extension of the space where we can meet, read, work, or eat together on a bench, which also serves as storage, around a custom-made table. Following the interior route, two glazes of translucent ribbed glass hint at shadows and offer a glimpse of the wet spaces.

These glazes, in turn, allow filtered northern light from the building's light well to enter the house and allow natural cross ventilation thanks to the upper operable parts designed for this purpose.
The construction process became a living laboratory where ad hoc solutions were rethought, tested, designed, and built, “because the work demanded it,” until a personal and welcoming atmosphere was found, enveloping us in textures, memories, smells, and colors that make us feel “at home” as soon as we open the door.