El Santuario · La Clave stand at Marbella Home Meeting 2026

Stop designing a stand and design a piece of furniture instead. El Santuario is a 30 m² temporary stand in Marbella — ten metres by three, freestanding on all four sides — built for Marbella Home Meeting 2026. The brief carried a trap: it had to display ceramic and timber wall and floor finishes alongside bathroom tapware without ending up looking like a tile shop. The answer was a self-supporting object in exposed timber, with the light hidden and the product turned into a room.

The brief

The briefing landed at the end of January 2026 and the fair ran on 16, 17 and 18 April: two and a half months to design it, document it and get it built. The pitch measured 10 x 3 m and had no shared walls. Not a single borrowed wall to lean on or to hang product from. The design had to accommodate four wall finishes and four floor finishes, ceramic and timber, plus the Italian Carimali tapware the client distributes.

The risk was spelled out in the first concept document: get away from the feel of a tile shop. A sample display goes up quickly and is forgotten ten metres later. The other constraint was the suppliers’ schedule, as they needed four to six weeks’ notice to deliver material. That means finalising the cutting list early rather than adjusting it on the fly.

Thirty square metres with no wall to lean on

With no shared walls, stability had to come from the object itself. The concept note put it plainly: the stand should work as one giant, self-supporting piece of furniture, with its rigidity in the roof grid and the timber tree. Instead of partitions, L-shaped planes and slatted screens. You divide the space without closing it off, and visitors read the whole stand from the aisle — the same way of zoning without putting up walls as at the PROMÁLAGA Teatinos Offices.

The pergola sets the order for everything else. A 1 x 1 m grid of 10 x 10 cm sections, three 8 x 8 cm posts carrying the client-service area, and the timber joints tongued, grooved and left on show. Maximum height was fixed at 3.00 m including the stand platform, and the platform, estimated at 3 cm, eats into that. The drawings note it: if the platform gets thicker, the vertical pieces are cut down.

Materials and light

The finishes are set out as an inverted L, with the floor material climbing the wall in a continuous one-metre band. It is an old device and it works, because the product stops reading as a sample stuck to a panel and starts reading as a room. That gallery takes up one of the three zones. In the second, a sectioned timber display tree carries the tapware like fruit, with a grid shelving unit beside it. The third is a table and chairs for sitting down to talk.

The timber is 2 cm thick in the tree and 2.5 cm in the shelving and the totem table, with the joinery on show and no joints concealed — the same carpentry logic as at Asador Iñaki on Calle Ayala (Málaga). All the lighting is linear and indirect: a vertical LED strip along the inner profile of the tree, a strip recessed around the perimeter of the roof beams, another integrated into the furniture, and a 3–5 cm lit plinth that lifts the stand off the floor. Directional spotlights are reserved for the product. Above the grid, a translucent sheet and hanging greenery filter the harsh light of the exhibition hall.

From brief to fair

Two and a half months between briefing and build. The proposed schedule allowed two weeks for the concept design and two for the construction project; the final proposal, with plan, circulation, elevations and renders, was signed off on 17 February. March produced the ten construction drawings, INT-PT-01 to INT-PT-10: dimensioned plan at 1:30, roof structure, wall and floor finish elevations, plan and section of the tree, cutting drawings for the tree, the shelving, the totem table and the signage, and the lighting plan.

Trade fair regulations set the rest. The final assembly certificate requires fire performance, a guarantee for the temporary structures, public liability insurance and Social Security registration for the crew. That is why the greenery is specified as fire-retardant, and why the timber cutting list is finalised before anyone starts cutting. The stand was built exactly as drawn and photographed on 17 April, mid-fair. It is the second stand we have designed for the same client: the first, at 39.98 m², was for Design Week Marbella in June 2022. The same discipline of a tight programme and an immovable opening date runs through commercial work such as the Clínica Veterinaria Mediterránea in Estepona.

Gallery

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Project data

• Typology: Temporary trade fair architecture · developer’s stand · experience design (interior design project)
• Use: Display and commercial: product display and customer service at a trade fair
• Event: Marbella Home Meeting 2026 (16, 17 and 18 April 2026)
• Venue: Palacio de Ferias y Congresos de Marbella
• Location: Marbella, Western Costa del Sol, Málaga
• Design year: 2026
• Construction year: 2026 (assembly and fair, April 2026)
• Status: Built
• Built area: 30 m² (freestanding stand, 10.00 x 3.00 m)
• Units: 1 freestanding stand
• Maximum height: 3.00 m, including the stand platform
• Client: Distributor of ceramic and timber wall and floor finishes and bathroom tapware, exhibiting at the fair
• Interior design: Klicstudio Arquitectura y Diseño SLP (Klic Arquitectos)
• Klic services: Concept design, construction project (10 drawings) and supplier coordination
• Team: Juan A. Goñi Uriarte (COA Málaga reg. no. 1206) and Ruth Buján Varela (COA Málaga reg. no. 1333)
• Main materials: oak, laminated timber, oak marquetry, linear LED profiles, natural and artificial greenery
• Photography: Fernando Gómez Mateos · loveladrillo