Project: House O / Location: Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain / Studio: X STUDIO / Location: Las Palmas de Gran Canaria / Material: APE Grupo (Vintage and Contemporary), Brand: Carmen / Photography: David Rodríguez
For House O, X Studio transformed a terraced house in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, restoring light, ventilation, spaciousness and the relationship with the outdoors. Additionally, the firm used tiles from APE Grupo to create distinct atmospheres in the kitchen and bathroom through the Vintage and Contemporary collections by Carmen.
The project received an Honourable Mention in the tile company’s APE Grupo Architecture Awards.
Located in the city’s Arenales district of Las Palmas, the original two-story terraced house was deep and excessively compartmentalised. With a single south-west-facing façade, it had lost many of the qualities traditionally associated with domestic architecture adapted to the Canary Islands climate, including cross-ventilation, natural daylight and spatial continuity.
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“The project begins with an apparently contradictory decision: removing the courtyard to gain usable floor area,” the project statement says. “What initially appears to be a sacrifice becomes the origin of something entirely different: a narrow fissure of light running through the house from end to end, organising the entire intervention.”
This internal garden acts as a green lung, a climatic filter and a spatial organiser. A large circular oculus connects the interior with the vegetation, turning light into the project’s central feature and creating a constantly changing landscape of shadows and reflections throughout the day.
The jury, chaired by Marta Peris (Peris+Toral Arquitectes, winners of the RIBA International Prize 2024), with Fernando Márquez Cecilia (El Croquis) and Ana del Campo (Territorial Association of Architects of Castellón) serving as jurors, highlighted, among other qualities, “the constructive honesty of an architecture that embraces the traces of time rather than concealing them.”
“This attitude is expressed through a continuous line marking the encounter between the new and the existing,” the project statement says. “While the intervention defines clean, carefully proportioned spaces, beams, ducts and installations remain visible, allowing the different layers that have shaped the house’s evolution to be clearly read.”
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Natural pine timber runs through the transitional spaces, integrating doors and storage while bringing warmth to the interior. In contrast, the ceramic surfaces introduce a dimension linked to light, color and sensory experience.
The firm used ceramics in two key areas of the home. In the kitchen, the Vintage collection by Carmen clads the worktop and splashback, creating a continuous surface that amplifies natural light. Its glazed finish introduces depth and reflections that contrast with the presence of exposed concrete. And in the main bathroom, the Contemporary collection envelops the space in an atmosphere inspired by water. Turquoise-green tines extend across walls and furniture, while the irregular ceramic texture multiplies the effects of natural light and reinforces the sensory character of the environment, the project statement says.
Judges praised this use of ceramics to define unified volumes in which color and materiality work as an integrated whole. Here, ceramics are not understood as an applied finish but as a resource capable of creating identity and atmosphere.
“House O demonstrates that a carefully measured intervention can transform what already exists without erasing it: light enters where previously there was nothing, and ultimately, that is enough,” the firm says.
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