Spain declared its estado de alarma on 14 March — the national lockdown that has kept most of the country indoors ever since. Our routines changed overnight, and with them our relationship with the place we live in. Within days the hashtag #YoMeQuedoEnCasa — “I’m staying at home” — was everywhere.
How many of us have improvised an office at the kitchen table, in the dining room or on a corner of the sofa? And how many important video calls have been derailed by family, children or noise from the street? Our homes are being reconfigured whether we like it or not. They adapt to what we now ask of them, and while they do, we start to notice what works, what does not, what is practical and what is simply missing.
All of that feeds back into the home itself. Once you have seen the gaps, you tend to want to close them — and when normal life returns, a good number of people will want to refurbish.
What should a home look like now? How do I improve the flat I already own? What should we be asking of the place we live in? Three ideas on home design after COVID-19, for whenever you next get the builders in.
1. SPACES THAT DO MORE THAN ONE JOB
By now we all know how much it matters to have somewhere to work. Very few homes, though, are large enough to give every activity a room of its own. The answer is not more rooms. It is flexible, open space that can be divided when you need it divided, so that two things can happen at once.
The house in Rincón de la Victoria by Klicstudio, which you can see on our website, is one example. A single large sliding partition either splits the room in two or opens it back up, depending on what the day needs.
Homes have been getting more open-plan for years, mostly for the sense of space it gives. What gets forgotten is that an open plan also has to be able to close. A room can be open and full of light and still need to be shut off for an hour.
This is about versatility. It also means being honest about what each part of the home is for: which corner takes the best light for working, which is quietest for sleeping, where you could realistically put a mat down and exercise.
Internal bathrooms are a good test of this. In Spanish flats they are commonly windowless and ventilated mechanically. If you have one, it seems a waste not to borrow daylight and fresh air from the bedroom next door for the parts of the routine that do not need privacy. That is the strategy behind the Rincón de la Victoria house.
2. ORIENTATION AND DAYLIGHT
Anyone thinking of buying will now put orientation near the top of the list. On the Costa del Sol a south or south-west facing flat behaves very differently in January from a north-facing one on the same staircase, and that difference is easy to miss on a viewing in May. After weeks of looking at the same four walls, buyers are also putting more value on the size of certain rooms and on the in-between spaces: terraces, and the glazed-in balconies Spanish homes call galerías.
It is not only the light from outside. The light you install inside is what gives a room its character. Low-level lighting, rather than a single bright fitting in the middle of the ceiling, will let one room behave like three across the course of a day.
3. COMFORT, IN THE DETAIL
Comfort is worth thinking through properly. The more hours you spend at home, the harder the technical side has to work: cooker extraction that actually pulls, and proper air changes through the whole flat. Spain’s building regulations set minimum ventilation rates for dwellings: the Código Técnico de la Edificación, or CTE, section DB-HS3. Plenty of older coastal properties were built long before 2006 and come nowhere near those figures. Ventilation is rarely the first line on a refurbishment budget. It deserves to be higher up than it usually is.
This is a rare chance to get to know our own homes: to improve what we already have with what is already there, to explore, to experiment and to play with small changes.
