A building that closes off a square and overlooks the start of calle Larios, with a façade, a courtyard and stairs that cannot be moved. In 2010 we studied what could be done with La Equitativa, in the historic centre of Málaga: 9,792.00 m² of built floor area in a property with level I architectural protection. The proposal had to fit in a hotel, a business centre, shops and the flats that were already in the tower. All within the same structure, and without any one use getting in the way of the others. It never went beyond a proposal: it was never built.
What the protection obliged us to keep at La Equitativa
The building is listed with level I architectural protection in the Catalogue of Protected Buildings of the PEPRI Centro (the special plan for the historic centre). In practice that meant three things: the façade stays, the courtyard stays, and the stairs and lifts stay where they are. The stairs and lifts would be brought up to current regulations, but they would not be moved.
With the vertical circulation and the courtyard fixed in advance, the programme had to be organised around them. The building runs to 9,792.00 m² across a ground floor and thirteen storeys, with a tower that narrows from the seventh floor upwards. And there is a constraint that appears on no planning data sheet: the building closes off the square and overlooks the start of calle Larios. Every decision about the façade or the ground floor is read from one of the busiest spaces in the city centre.
Four uses, four ways in
The real problem was not style; it was coexistence. A hotel, a business centre, shops and the flats still in the tower, all inside the same protected building. The decision was to separate the entrances completely, rather than share a single entrance hall between four uses.
The existing entrance was kept for the hotel: 113–120 rooms from the second to the seventh floor. Only the reception would be at ground level, and the hotel as a whole was kept fully independent of the rest of the programme, as regulations require. The residential tower was given a new entrance of its own from the rear passage, so that its escape routes are resolved separately from the other uses (CTE DB-SI, the fire safety section of the CTE, the Spanish Technical Building Code). That freed the ground floor for shops with direct access from the street, which also took up the first floor in the lower part of the building.
A percentage decided the business centre
The business centre was placed on the first and second floors of the tower for a regulatory reason, not a formal one. There the use is compatible with the existing residential use because it accounts for less than 50% of the building’s occupancy. The layout of uses came from reading the regulations, not from drawing an idea and defending it afterwards.
The use table on the November 2010 panel splits the 9,792.00 m² as follows: 6,215.59 m² hotel, 1,827.77 m² retail and 1,748.64 m² residential. The business centre is described in the report but has no floor area of its own in the table. At that stage of the work it was a use settled in plan but not yet quantified.
What came of it
The proposal was documented in eight drawings at 1:200 dated October 2010 and an A1 panel with an exploded axonometric of floors and uses: residential in green, hotel in grey, retail in yellow. A photomontage places the volume in its surroundings. Mechanised parking was also studied, catalogue of automatic systems included; it never made it onto the panel.
One figure explains the difficulty of the operation better than any image. Another version of the panel, from the same November 2010, keeps the 9,792.00 m² total but adds a fourth category: 900 m² belonging to owners who were not taking part in the refurbishment. The building did not have a single owner, and an intervention of this size needed them to agree. Why it went no further is not documented; what we do know is that no construction project was ever drawn up and no work was ever carried out.
That preliminary work — what the listing requires, which uses fit, how many square metres there really are — is what decides whether a heritage project makes sense. And it is done before the first façade is drawn. If you are dealing with a protected building, get in touch with our studio in Málaga.
Gallery
Project data
- Typology: Architectural proposal for a protected historic building — mixed use
- Use: Hotel, business centre, retail and residential
- Location: La Equitativa building, Plaza Félix Sáenz, opposite calle Marqués de Larios — Historic centre of Málaga
- Heritage protection: Level I architectural protection (Arquitectónica I), Catalogue of Protected Buildings, PEPRI Centro
- Design year: 2010
- Status: Unbuilt proposal
- Built area: 9,792.00 m² (hotel 6,215.59 m² · retail 1,827.77 m² · residential 1,748.64 m²)
- Units: 113–120-room hotel, on the second to seventh floors
- Client: Private owners
- Klic services: Preliminary study and design proposal
- Graphic documentation: Eight drawings at 1:200, A1 panel with axonometric of floors and uses, and an urban integration photomontage
- Team: Juan Alejandro Goñi Uriarte (COA Málaga reg. no. 1206) and Ruth Buján Varela (COA Málaga reg. no. 1333)
Other projects in central Málaga
Discover other Klic Arquitectos projects in central Málaga: Edificio MOSS, a tourist apartment building in Málaga city, Casa Duquesa de Parcent in the Soho district, and our key points for building or renovating in Málaga’s Soho.
