When David and Monica initially toured this first-floor flat in Valencia, Spain, there was a different color of tile in every room. Green and black for the hallway, pink in a bedroom, and a rust-mint checked pattern in the living room. It was a lot. “I had a little bit of trouble with so many patterns and colors,” recalls Monica. “I liked it, but not all of them, all together, at the same time.”

The couple currently live in Sweden, but she’s from Madrid and he grew up in Valencia, so they’d been looking for a house in Spain’s third largest city for a while. “I always dreamt of having my own place there,” says David, while Monica was happy to exchange Madrid’s hot inland climate for sea breezes. “Having a house by the sea is like a dream for me,” she says.

To that end, their property search honed in on Valencia’s seaside El Cabanyal neighborhood, which has easy access to the beach and row after row of quiet streets lined with modest fisherman’s houses, their fronts often covered in bright color or tile.

“The whole Spanish coast of the Mediterranean has been overdeveloped since the sixties and seventies, but Cabanyal has been left alone,” says David. And while many renovators tend to gut these old properties completely on the interior, that was not how David and Monica wanted to proceed with their remodel. “We didn’t want to remove the old wood doors and the tiles,” says David. “We wanted to keep as much as possible.”

Before: Entry

After: Entry

Despite the narrow, complicated layout packed with small rooms, the home had two things the couple really liked: ceilings over twelve feet high, and a rear patio. “In many of the renovated apartments that we looked at, they lowered the ceiling to put in ventilation and cables,” says David. “That’s a pretty common procedure.” These tall ceilings made their narrow plan feel bigger.

As for the patio, it was partially covered by an ad hoc addition and used for storage by the previous owners. While the couple waited a year for their permits to come through—“That year we were thinking and sketching and planning,” says Monica—they came up with the starting point for their redesign. “We started right away with the big windows at the back of the house,” she explains. “That was the first thing.”

Before: Front Bedroom

After: Front Bedroom

Monica and David removed the addition to enlarge the outdoor space, then demolished the tiny kitchen inside the house, and the exterior rear wall. In its stead, they installed oversized sliding glass doors that open to the patio. The move brings significantly more natural light into the house, and when the doors are open they extend the living space outdoors. Next, they relocated the kitchen to a dark-tiled nook in the middle of the house, which didn’t have much use otherwise.

Before: Hallway

After: Hallway

During the build, the couple made an unfortunate discovery. Many of these homes were originally built in the late 1920s directly atop the sand, says David—without insulation from the rising humidity coming from beneath the building.

This wasn’t a problem until the surrounding areas became more developed with asphalt and concrete, which prevented the moisture from evaporating properly. Now, it’s not uncommon for homeowners to have “bubbling floors” or snaking capillaries in their walls as a result of trapped moisture.

At David and Monica’s house, the telltale sign of moisture problems was the smell. “You really felt that it wasn’t a healthy home,” says David. “We needed to do something.” Working with David’s cousin, who is an architect specializing in vernacular architecture, they pulled up the tile to create a system of ventilation channels under the floor and in the courtyard.

“It was a little bit of an experiment,” says David. “So far, so good. It feels dry and nice. The smell has disappeared completely.”

Before: Kitchen

After: Kitchen

Resolving the moisture issue meant the couple had to tear up all of the original floor tile, which they replaced with a terrazzo tile produced in Valencia; its neutral color makes the wainscot pop. But they did save some of the original hydraulic floor tile to reuse in the previously plain-white bathroom, which needed some gloss to fit with the rest of the house.

“Everything is kind of shiny here. In previous homes, we never went for shiny, but here we just embraced it,” says David. “I think these funky patterns grew on us.”

Before: Living Room

After: Living Room

Before: Kitchen

After: Dining Room

Before: Rear Facade

After: Rear Facade

Before: Courtyard

After: Courtyard

Before: Bathroom

After: Bathroom

More Before & After stories:

This Canary Islands Home Was a Crumbling Ruin, but She Rebuilt It Piece by Piece

In Spain, a Compact 1960s Apartment Gets a Quirky, Experimental Retrofit

A Family of Architects Turn a “Cave” Into a Light-Filled Apartment

Project Credits:

Architect: Fernando Vegas and Camila Mileto

Technical Supervisor: Salvador Tomás Márquez