Open up the living floor, turn the patio into a dining room that folds open entirely towards the golf course, and go from two bathrooms to three without stepping outside the existing footprint. Casa Brisas is a renovation with interior design in Marbella for a two-storey townhouse built in 1989. The house came to us compartmentalised, with the golf and sea views shut away in the living room and the patio, and with two bathrooms for three bedrooms.
The commission
The house is a two-storey townhouse built in 1989 according to the cadastral record (catastro, Spain’s official property register). The client’s brief dated it to 1983; we went with the cadastral figure, because that is the one that can be verified. It has 204 m² of built area on a 263 m² plot, with the three bedrooms and the bathrooms on the lower floor and the living room, kitchen, hall, laundry room, garage and patio on the upper floor.
The commission came with a method, and in English: a client questionnaire, a numbered design brief at revision 001 and a comments tracker in which every point is logged with the owner’s comment, our response and its status, open or closed. The first entry is dated 3 March 2025. The project was issued in both Spanish and English.
Before drawing anything, we surveyed the existing house with a digital scan: 674 frames with their depth maps, captured on 7 January 2025. In an interior renovation this is not technical showmanship; it is what prevents the argument three months later, when a partition wall turns out not to be where the inherited drawing said it was. The project is signed by Juan A. Goñi Uriarte and Ruth Buján Varela, the same studio that designed the Kids Club at Hotel Puente Romano.
Opening up the living floor, decision by decision
One move underpins everything: opening up the living floor. The brief asked for an open plan between kitchen and living room, and required us to draw two options before deciding: a kitchen with an island, or a kitchen with a breakfast bar keeping the partition wall. The choice was to open it up.
The numbers explain the trade-off better than adjectives. The kitchen grows from 10.69 to 16.64 m² and the hall from 7.28 to 10.00 m². Those square metres come from the living room, which shrinks from 38.99 to 31.43 m². On a drawing, a smaller living room is alarming; in use you don’t notice it, because it stops being a closed room and becomes the centre of a continuous floor that takes in the kitchen, hall and dining room.
Everything stays within the existing footprint. There are no structural drawings in the file because none are needed: the renovation is resolved with partition walls, services and finishes. That is also why it is feasible in a townhouse on a residential estate, where any change to the façade opens up a dispute with the community of owners (comunidad de propietarios). If you would like to see how we handle the living floor in other homes, Casa Posh, in Altos del Rodeo, and Villa Kauai, at La Cala Golf (Mijas), are both published.
The patio, turned into a dining room
The patio measures 15.91 m² and it is the spot from which you see the golf course and the sea. The brief asked for it to become a dining room, with the same flooring as the living room, enclosed with double-glazed joinery. The as-renovated drawing no longer calls it a patio: it is labelled ‘Terrace/Dining room, 15.91 m²’.
The enclosure is folding joinery that stacks away entirely to one side, so the space works as a climate-controlled dining room in January and as an open terrace in July; a split air-conditioning unit is provided for it, and another for the garage. The flooring continues from the living room and the existing awning stays. The 15.91 m² do not change in size: they change in category.
Bathrooms, joinery and where the commission ends
On the bedroom floor, two bathrooms become three. The existing two, of 7.84 and 6.94 m², are reorganised into three rooms of 8.10, 3.86 and 3.27 m², two of them en suite. Baths out, level-access walk-in showers in, and all the vanity units wall-hung, clear of the floor.
This is the real limit of this house, and it is worth saying plainly: those bathrooms have no natural light or natural ventilation. Finishes do not fix that. It is offset with what can be resolved: mechanical ventilation in the three bathrooms and the guest WC, electric towel rails in the three bathrooms, and lighting that has to do the job on its own twenty-four hours a day. But this is something you need to know before you sign, not after.
The materials follow the same logic: porcelain stoneware for wall and floor tiling, with anti-slip ranges in wet areas and outdoors; timber wall cladding indoors; polished concrete in the garage and laundry room; and the existing terrazzo restored with a floor treatment rather than ripped out. The internal doors are pre-lacquered MDF on local pine sub-frames; the front door is a security door faced in oak. The windows are two-tone: white outside, because the community of owners requires it, and dark inside, which is what the client wanted. When a private rule clashes with an interior design decision, there is almost always a window frame that satisfies both.
The commission is at the design stage. There is a feasibility study, a scheme design, an interior design package with fifteen visualisations, the renovation project and a services drawing (the last date in the file is 15 July 2025), and the annotations drawing still has open decisions: underfloor heating, home automation, type of shutters. Nothing has been built yet: what you see are our own visualisations, not photographs. There are more published projects on the western Costa del Sol, such as Villa Rouse in Benahavís, and the rest are collected on our renovations page.
If you have a townhouse in the same situation, compartmentalised, with two bathrooms for three bedrooms and a terrace that is only used two months a year, the right order is to measure first and decide afterwards. Get in touch with the studio and we will look at it on the basis of a survey, not a hunch.
Gallery
Project data
- Typology: Full renovation of a single-family townhouse, with interior design
- Use: Residential · private home
- Location: Marbella · Málaga
- Design year: 2025
- Status: Project delivered · not built · images: studio visualisations
- Built area: 204 m² (cadastral record)
- Plot area: 263 m²
- Units: 1 home
- Client: Private client
- Interior design: Klic Arquitectos · an in-house phase of the commission, not subcontracted
- MEP engineering: Resolved within Klic’s own project: electrics, split air conditioning, ventilation and extraction
- Klic services: Existing-condition survey, feasibility study, scheme design, interior design, renovation project and services design
- Team: Juan A. Goñi Uriarte (reg. no. 1206, COA Málaga) and Ruth Buján Varela (reg. no. 1333, COA Málaga)
