A single-storey house on the Monte Alto hillside, the sea in the distance and the main room turned, at last, towards the garden. Casa Chai is a renovation with interior design in Benalmádena that starts from a very familiar problem: the house arrived heavily compartmentalised, with the living room split into two spaces of 9.64 and 14.16 m² and a 6.34 m² kitchen. The commission, from January 2020, asked for all three things together: managing the building permit, the construction project with CGIs, and construction supervision.
The commission: permit, project and construction supervision
Monte Alto is one of Benalmádena’s established residential urbanisations, set into the hillside between the old village and Arroyo de la Miel: sloping plots, Mediterranean planting, the sea in the distance. The house is a single-storey detached home of roughly 116 m², with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. We have worked on both sides of the municipality — Casa Caliza in Benalmádena Pueblo, Casa Leala in Arroyo de la Miel — and the starting point tends to repeat itself: enough floor area, cut into rooms that are too small.
The fee proposal was signed on 21 January 2020 and covered three pieces of work: managing the building permit (licencia de obra), including the site survey, the measured drawings of the existing house and processing the application with the Town Hall; the construction project with CGIs; and construction supervision. The project was to be delivered within two weeks of the client approving the design, and construction supervision was agreed at one site visit a week for as long as the works lasted. The first set of drawings is dated the following day.
Opening up the plan meant touching the structure
Joining the living room, dining area and kitchen was not a question of knocking down partitions. The February 2020 bill of quantities lists the installation and removal of temporary propping to the horizontal slab over the porch and living room, and the demolition of a reinforced concrete strip footing. In other words, what divided those rooms was carrying load: to take it out, you hold the slab up while the support is replaced. The structure was resolved within the project itself, with the foundations and slab drawn by the studio. On a small renovation, that is the difference between deciding on paper and deciding on site with the props already up.
The figures from the revised layout: living room 25.65 m², dining area 10.90 m² and kitchen 10.80 m², compared with the existing layout’s living room split into 9.64 and 14.16 m² and its 6.34 m² kitchen. The main bedroom comes to 14.80 m². Turning the principal room towards the view and the garden is the same move we repeat on our coastal renovations, such as Casa Al Mar, right on the beachfront.
Materials, building services and interior design
The interior design was part of the same commission rather than a later phase: a natural palette of whites, timbers and stone, contemporary furniture and made-to-measure pieces in the kitchen and bathrooms. Four CGIs were delivered — living-dining-kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and an exterior view — each with one round of revisions. They are there to settle finishes before they are bought, not after.
The parts you cannot see matter just as much. The bill of quantities includes internal thermal insulation to the façade and acoustic insulation, a 150-litre electric water heater and pre-installation for solar panels. Insulating from the inside takes a few centimetres off the room; in exchange you never touch the façade and you need no scaffolding. And completing the solar pre-installation now saves opening up the ceilings again later. You can see how we approach this kind of work on our renovations page.
From drawings to site
On 25 February 2020 we delivered the drawings together with a blind bill of quantities: every item measured, so that several building contractors tender on exactly the same scope and the client compares figures that measure the same thing. Whoever is going to build the job is the one who prices it; the studio sets the scope, not the number.
A second round of CGIs followed on 3 March and a drawing revision on 22 April 2020, with the design already finalised. Construction supervision was contracted at one site visit a week: often enough to correct things in time, without turning the job into a standing meeting.
There is more of our work in the municipality if you want to compare: Casa Maravillas in Benalmádena Costa and Edificio Terra in Santangelo. And if your house has the same problem — plenty of floor area, badly divided — the first step is to find out what lies behind the partitions before anything is drawn. Get in touch with the studio.
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Project data
- Typology: Full renovation with interior design of a detached house
- Use: Residential · detached house
- Location: Monte Alto · Benalmádena · Málaga
- Design year: 2020
- Status: Project delivered in February 2020
- Floor area: Approx. 116 m², as stated in the commission
- Units: 1 home
- Programme: Living room 25.65 m², dining room 10.90 m², kitchen-breakfast room 10.80 m², three bedrooms (main bedroom 14.80 m²), two bathrooms, entrance hall, inner hall, corridor and indoor-garden connection. Usable floor areas of the revised layout
- Client: Private client
- Architecture studio: Klic Arquitectos · Málaga
- Structure: Klic Arquitectos: foundations and slab drawn within the project itself
- Building services engineering: Klic Arquitectos: domestic hot water calculations and water supply sizing
- Interior design: Klic Arquitectos
- CGIs: Klic Arquitectos
- Klic services: Building permit management, construction project with CGIs and construction supervision, with one site visit a week
- Team: Juan A. Goñi Uriarte (COA Málaga reg. no. 1206) and Ruth Buján Varela (COA Málaga reg. no. 1333)
