GRAPHĒ

Photographer and Writer Emma Sepúlveda’s Spanish Apartment Lets the Artwork Talk

Muted tones, opened spaces, and raised ceilings bring a galleryesque feel to the renovated Valencia flat.

Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.

Project Details:

Location: Valencia, Spain

Architect: Homu Arquitectos / @homuarquitectos

Footprint: 2,551 square feet

Builder: Enue

Photographer: Bacon Studio / @bacon__studio

From the Architect: "Emma Sepúlveda and her husband relocated to Valencia, Spain, to be closer to their son, who had settled in the city years earlier. Drawn to the rhythm of Mediterranean life, they decided to fully renovate an apartment on the Gran Vía. Their brief was concise but clear: restore the maximum ceiling height; preserve or reinterpret the building’s original moldings; prioritize open, generous spaces reminiscent of their American homes; maintain a strong visual connection to the tree-lined boulevard below; and immerse themselves in Mediterranean culture while retaining the spatial flow that had defined their way of living. A key challenge shaped the project from the outset: most of Emma’s creative work happens at home. The design therefore needed to balance openness with the privacy, calm, and focus required for writing, photography and artistic experimentation.

"The apartment was conceived with a deliberately pared-back program. Accustomed to large, open domestic environments in the U.S., the couple requested only one main bedroom suite with a walk-in closet, plus a small guest room primarily intended for their two granddaughters. The remainder of the home unfolds as an expansive day area designed for cooking, conversation, relaxation, and hosting—spaces that support an intuitive, unhurried way of living.

"The aesthetic aligns with minimalism with soul and purpose—an approach that merges visual clarity with emotional resonance. The chromatic palette is built around whites, grays, and ash tones, evoking the blank page that awaits any creative mind. This quiet backdrop allows the architecture to recede, letting the couple’s artwork, photographs, and objects, from Chile and decades of travel, occupy the space naturally. To the left of the dining area, a wall leads into the first open workspace, where a custom display unit showcases Emma’s photography equipment. Two reclaimed and restored doors, curated by the studio, mark the threshold to Emma’s private office.

"Generous and filled with natural light, the kitchen is anchored by a large central island, merging Mediterranean conviviality with the American tradition of the kitchen as the heart of the home. The main living area is articulated through a series of partial-height dividers that maintain long sight lines and natural light while carving out subtly differentiated atmospheres. A small, cave-like nook is an intimate retreat for the couple or for quiet conversations with friends. This softly enclosed corner acts as a counterbalance to the expansive openness.

"Although the owners hoped to preserve the original moldings, the installation of a new ducted HVAC system required rebuilding the false ceiling. The architects used this intervention to increase the ceiling height and introduce larger, more contemporary moldings scaled to the renewed volume of the rooms. Their integration into the bespoke carpentry reinforces spatial coherence while adding an elegant, contemporary character. A continuous ash-gray porcelain floor runs throughout the home, acting as a seamless surface that enhances visual calm and gives prominence to art, furniture, and daily life.

"Materiality in the project strikes a balance between contemporary finishes and salvaged pieces. Interior doors and the stone washbasins in the bathrooms were sourced from demolition sites and carefully chosen for their proportions. Each piece was restored to align with the couple’s aesthetic sensibilities while ensuring easy long-term maintenance—objects with past lives, given new meaning.

"Emma Sepúlveda’s personal journey is embedded in every square foot of this home. A poet, essayist, literary critic, photographer and civil rights advocate, Emma spent more than fifty years in the United States, where she became a public figure in Nevada. After years of witnessing growing social unrest, she and her husband chose to begin a new chapter in Valencia. Her home reflects that search for refuge—a place to create, remember, converse, rest and start anew."

See the full story on Dwell.com: Photographer and Writer Emma Sepúlveda’s Spanish Apartment Lets the Artwork Talk

How They Pulled It Off: A Hilltop Home in Italy Built Around a 17th-Century Watchtower

The residence, built out of bricks sourced from nearby demolished farmhouses, merges with the tower via glass walls.

Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.

The old farmhouse and adjacent 17th-century watchtower Emanuela and Francesco sought to renovate in the mountainous Abruzzo region of central Italy was at the top of a hill so steep, the couple called it "Peppa Pig hill", after an episode of the animated kids’ show in which Peppa Pig’s family hikes a steep slope. There are views there—hence the watchtower—but the farmhouse itself, which previously belonged to Francesco’s family, had been made unlivable by several earthquakes.

Loggias and pergolas modulate light and wind.

In its place the couple built their new family home with the help of Florence studio Map Architetti, creating a plan that wraps around the watchtower—from a glass-walled entry, through the dining area, and around to the living room. The home’s two levels (not to mention the tower) capture views of the Gran Sasso range, and the interiors feature bespoke oak joinery, brick floors, and exposed concrete and wood beams. Map Architetti blended the home with the watchtower (which required extensive repairs) by sourcing reclaimed brick from nearby farmhouses that had been demolished, creating a novel hilltop home that references the region’s rural vernacular while looking out over it.

The Flos Aim Pendants, designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, hang above the family dining table. The Odger dining chairs in anthracite from IKEA complement the set-up. — Flos Aim pendants, designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, hang above the dining table, surrounded by Odger dining chairs in anthracite from Ikea. The dining table and kitchen were designed by Map Architetti.

Marco Gualtieri

Heated brick floors are underfoot, with oak joinery adding warmth to the exposed concrete beams. — The brick floors are heated. A Vanity Fair armchair by Poltrona Frau sits alongside a Frau Sofa by Nicolain.

Marco Gualtieri

See the full story on Dwell.com: How They Pulled It Off: A Hilltop Home in Italy Built Around a 17th-Century Watchtower
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Avocados Grow All Around This San Diego Midcentury Seeking $2.6M

Designed by architect Lloyd Ruocco for a local contractor, the low-slung home has redwood framing, stone walls, and views of the surrounding mountains.

Designed by architect Lloyd Ruocco for a local contractor, this low-slung home has redwood framing, stone walls, and views of the surrounding mountains.

Location: 4421 Mayapan Drive, La Mesa, California

Price: $2,600,000

Year Built: 1949

Architect: Lloyd Ruocco

Renovation Date: 2014

Footprint: 4,620 square feet (4 bedrooms, 6 baths)

Lot Size: 1.5 Acres

From the Agent: "Completed in February 1948, this modernist home of redwood, glass, and stone was built for a local building contractor as his personal residence through his firm, Jackson & Scott. Historically designated, this private, expansive oasis engages its entire 1.5 acres. Serving only four families since its postwar construction, the home is emblematic of architect Lloyd Ruocco’s early work. Sited to integrate well with its site, the residence has heavy masonry and redwood construction and an airy quality thanks to expanses of glass."

The home features a low-slung roof, redwood structure, and built-in stone fireplace.

Photo by Ollie Paterson

See the full story on Dwell.com: Avocados Grow All Around This San Diego Midcentury Seeking $2.6M
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The Parquet Floors of This U.K. Country Home Are Made of Ash Felled On-Site

The residence is deeply reverential of it setting, blending with the apple orchard around it that’s been in the family for decades.

Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.

Project Details:

Location: Cheshire, United Kingdom

Architect: Studio Bark / @studiobark

Footprint: 1,840 square feet

Structural Engineer: Structure Workshop

Ecology Consultant: Solum Environmental

Aboricultural Consultant: TEP

Photographer: Jim Stephenson / @clickclickjim

From the Architect: "Built for an environmentally conscious young family, the home sits on the site of a former orchard with deep personal roots. The design was shaped by the client’s memories of helping grandparents pick fruit and run the orchard’s machinery, a working landscape rich with seasonal rhythms. Four decades on, the orchard has been replanted with local species and is once again thriving. The family are now fully at home in a modest, highly tailored dwelling, one that supports everyday life while remaining deeply connected to the land.

"From the outset, the design was shaped by the site. Two living ‘cubes’ with inset terraces frame the key views: eastward over open fields and southwest towards woodland. A pitched roof timber clad ‘bridge’ links the cubes, creating a quiet space for reading and reflection. The asymmetric form brings depth and rhythm, unified by silvery larch cladding that beds the house into its surroundings. Concealed timber shutters provide shade and allow the home to close down in the evenings or during summer heat. The maturing orchard enfolds the house, providing food, structure, and a living connection to family history.

"The timber-framed home follows a materials strategy centered on natural, locally sourced elements, grounding the design in its setting and reducing embodied carbon. The cladding softens the building into the landscape, while inside, parquet flooring is crafted from an ash tree force-felled from the site due to dieback, literally rooting the house in its own ground.

"Situated in the Green Belt, the project faced challenging circumstances for winning planning approval. Drawing on their experience with isolated rural homes, Studio Bark secured approval in 2016 under Paragraph 79 of the National Planning Policy Framework (now Paragraph 84)—a policy that permits truly exceptional designs in isolated countryside locations. Such was the quality of the design and the rigor of the environmental backbone of the project that the planning committee agreed that the ‘Very Special Circumstances Test’ required for Green Belt sites had been met.

"Orchard House’s environmental strategy is built on simplicity and site-specific thinking. Early studies mapped wind patterns, sun paths, and biodiversity features to ensure comfort with minimal energy demand. PHPP (Passivhaus Planning Package) was used to improve U-Values, reduce thermal bridging, and manage solar gain and various material life cycle studies were carried out to reduce embodied carbon and ongoing life cycle carbon emissions. Local, low-impact materials reduce environmental impact while creating calm, tactile interiors. The central bridge houses a user-controlled core for heat and ventilation management. The use of monitoring sensors and occasional thermal imaging allows ongoing performance checks, enabling refinements that have significantly reduced heat demand, improved air quality, and balanced internal temperatures year-round."

See the full story on Dwell.com: The Parquet Floors of This U.K. Country Home Are Made of Ash Felled On-Site

The Battle Over Barcelona’s Plazas Is Bigger Than Skateboarding

Smooth-surfaced public spaces made the city an unlikely mecca for the sport. But spots for noseslides and kickflips aren’t all that’s lost with redevelopment.

For nearly 30 years, the plaza in front of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art has been central to the city’s skateboarding scene. Plaça dels Àngels was envisioned as a public space in service of the museum, yet its black granite ledges, inclined planes, and smooth, continuous surfaces—designed by architect Richard Meier as a counterpoint to the white, curvilinear facade he gave the museum—formed a perfect vocabulary for skateboarding. Located in the center of El Raval, a working-class neighborhood just a stone's throw from La Rambla, a famous promenade in the city, the square was progressively appropriated by a growing skate community, whose persistent filming and self-mythologization turned it into an accidental model for skate plazas worldwide, cementing Barcelona’s reputation as a global skate mecca.

Today, however, skateboarding at the plaza is under threat. Over time, MACBA has progressively expanded across the plaza, with its spaces now including the main building, a research center on the west side, and the Convent dels Àngels, a former nunnery that, since 2006, has served as additional exhibition space for the museum. The latest expansion project, whose construction began in February 2025, aims to enlarge the exhibition space of the convent by adding a new wing that would connect these three buildings, taking over nearly 10,000 square feet of public space and gradually enveloping Plaça dels Àngels, at the expenses of residents, but also skaters and what the city has come to symbolize globally for the sport.

Skaters have been using the plaza in front of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art for decades. Redevelopments by the museum, including one now under construction, have slowly been shrinking the space.

Becoming a skate mecca

It was by chance that skate culture would become so essential to Barcelona at all. In 1983 architecture firm Estudio Viaplana-Piñon built Plaça dels Països Catalans, a square in front of Sants train station that would set the standard for Barcelona’s public space in the decades to come, and, as it would turn out, become one of the city’s best skate spots. (In spite of being recognized in 2019 as one of the city’s cultural heritage assets, it, too, is facing redevelopment. A collective dedicated to its preservation, SNT4EVER, is calling for a redesign that acknowledges its longtime use by skaters. In the meantime, the collective has inaugurated a new skate plaza in the nearby Jardins de la Rambla de Sants, developed in collaboration with local entities and Barcelona City Council, as an alternative during construction.)

Plaça dels Països Catalans is constructed above active railway tracks, conceived without trees not as a stylistic choice but due to technical constraints: planting them would have interfered with railway infrastructure and maintenance access, while also requiring complex structural solutions to support soil and root systems over the tracks. (The square was later awarded the FAD Prize—a prestigious Spanish architecture and design award—because of its pioneering design.) Its fully paved granite surface was radically low-maintenance, making it a long-term solution that was both more durable and less costly than landscaped plazas. It also supported a constant flow of people, accommodating the comings and goings of a busy train station. These qualities made Sants a model for Barcelona’s urban design, establishing the plaza dura, as they’re known, as a repeatable, democratic typology that would shape much of the city’s public space.

snt4ever designated area while sants under construciton.

See the full story on Dwell.com: The Battle Over Barcelona’s Plazas Is Bigger Than Skateboarding

’60s Charm Meets 21st-Century Eco-Friendly Tech at This $2M Hudson Valley Home

The post-and-beam residence was recently updated with solar panels, geothermal heating and cooling, and a pair of backup batteries.

This post-and-beam residence was recently updated with solar panels, geothermal heating and cooling, and a pair of backup batteries.

Location: 23 Crossbar Road, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

Price: $1,999,000

Year Built: 1963

Architect: Harry Wenning

Renovation Date: 2025

Renovation Architect: Gabriel Köche Cé

Footprint: 3,122 square feet (5 bedrooms, 3 baths)

Lot Size: 0.26 Acres

From the Agent: "Welcome to this exceptional 1963 midcentury-modern residence by Harry Wenning, fully renovated for contemporary living. The home offers five bedrooms and three bathrooms and stands as a rare example of near off-grid, climate-resilient living in Westchester County. Upstairs are three bedrooms and two baths, including a reimagined primary suite with a spa-like bath. The lower level offers two additional bedrooms, a full bath, a gym, music spaces, and a dedicated laundry room. Set on a level, sun-filled lot and located in one of Hastings-on-Hudson’s most desirable neighborhoods, this architecturally significant home seamlessly combines timeless design with forward-thinking sustainability."

Large south-facing windows bring natural light into the home.

Photo by Judy Justin

A wood-burning fireplace warms the living room. — A woodburning fireplace warms the living room.

Photo by Judy Justin

See the full story on Dwell.com: ’60s Charm Meets 21st-Century Eco-Friendly Tech at This $2M Hudson Valley Home
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They Channeled the "Oontz Oontz" of One of Berlin’s Most Famous Nightclubs Into an Apartment

"I briefly considered a fog machine," says one of the owners, who wanted to bring home the feeling of Berghain.

Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.

Project Details:

Location: Berlin, Germany

Architect: Studio Karhard / @

Footprint: 1,022 square feet

Builder: PlanB Works

Sound Engineer: H.A.N.D. Hifi

Light Programming: Room Division

Smart Home: m.integration

Photographer: Robert Rieger / @robertrieger

From the Architect: "Twenty years ago, the German architecture firm studio Karhard designed one of Berlin’s most famous clubs—Berghain. That project inspired a German-American couple, the founders Thomas Karsten and Alexandra Erhard, to commission the studio to design their secondary residence in Kreuzberg.

"It was obvious that they liked the club’s technical, raw atmosphere – something you wouldn’t usually expect in a private home," says Karsten. "So we tried to turn that into something cozy." The apartment was to reflect the clients’ lifestyle, with more storage space and a generous kitchen for entertaining guests. After first exploring a few smaller ideas, the architects realized that the existing proportions didn’t quite work. They therefore proposed a full renovation—a new spatial layout that transformed the original two-room apartment into a three-room dwelling: now featuring a separate bedroom and workspace.

"At the heart of the new floor plan stands a curved glass-block wall that divides the entrance and the living area without blocking daylight. ‘Playing with light was one of our first ideas,’ explains Karsten. ‘The translucent blocks are lit from within, and the illuminated wall lends the space an almost cinematic mood—quite unusual for a Berlin apartment.’"

"Studio Karhard structured the apartment through light and atmosphere, using deliberate contrasts between bright and dark zones. Particularly striking is the ‘mystical’ guest bathroom, a miniature homage to the techno club, complete with a metal grid ceiling, color-adjustable lighting, and an almost theatrical effect. ‘I briefly considered adding a fog machine,’ laughs Karsten. ‘This little room plays with the futuristic theme.’ In terms of materials, the studio combined cool metals such as stainless steel and untreated brass with tactile textures like structured plaster, terrazzo flooring, and rich velvet upholstery, which Karsten says evoke ‘the Milanese style of the 1960s.’ ‘Everything we do revolves around materials,’ he emphasizes. ‘Here, classic substances meet the warm tones of walls and fabrics.’"

"The result is the product of intensive collaboration with the clients: ‘The owners were involved in every detail; it was like a game of ping-pong,’ says Karsten. ‘They gave us freedom, and we worked closely with craftsmen to develop tailor-made solutions.’ The outcome is an interior that translates the spirit of Berghain into a domestic setting: atmospheric, layered, and uniquely personal."