Balzar Arquitectos Wraps an 1890 Valencia Apartment's Plaster Salons in Curved Oak and Travertine

Valencia's Ciutat Vella has more than two thousand years of Roman, medieval and modernist layers, and any apartment inside it inherits a share of that weight. Balzar Arquitectos took on a 200 m² flat in a building dated 1890 and completed it in 2025. The team was led by Txema García Ballester and Laura Moreno Albuixech, with Javier Fabado Saucedo on design and Nekonato Gallery on interiors. The stated aim is familiar: preserve the historic identity and adapt it to contemporary life. Most projects with that brief end up as a polite renovation. This one has a clearer argument.

What interests us is the split in the apartment's character. The front rooms keep their ornate plaster, carved doors and mosaic floors almost untouched, while the private zones are lined in dark oak, curved at the corners and lit low. The result reads as two eras placed side by side, with the joinery acting as a new building inserted into the old one. The material palette is short: wood, stone and fabric. That restraint is what lets the 1890 ornament keep the attention.

Letting the Plaster Do the Talking

The cornices with vine relief, the rosette friezes, the ceiling medallions and the cherub in its scrolling foliage are the apartment's real inheritance. Balzar keeps them white and clean, with no colour picked out and no fresh gilding. The plaster reads as surface and shadow, and the warm side light in these rooms gives it depth.

It is a disciplined call. Restoration can easily slide into theatre, and here the ornament is treated as a found condition rather than a theme to build the whole interior around.

The Carved Doors as Frames

The carved double doors between the living and dining rooms are kept open and work as picture frames. From the sofa you look through to an oval table under a ceiling rose. From the chevron parquet you see chairs set against a tall window. The enfilade, a typical feature of nineteenth-century flats, is restored as the main way of experiencing the front of the apartment.

The furniture choices support this. The oval table and round-backed chairs have no hard corners to cut across the axis, so your eye passes through the door and settles on the window light.

Soft Shapes in a Formal Room

The living room uses curves almost everywhere: a cream sofa, a rounded walnut table, curved-back chairs and a bouclé lounge chair on a chunky timber base. Pieces from Ferm Living and Arketipo appear in the credits, and the selection steers toward low, heavy forms that sit beneath the moulded walls rather than competing with them.

The fluted timber sideboard is the smartest piece in the room. Its vertical ribs pick up the rhythm of the plaster mouldings without copying any ornament, which is the kind of quiet echo that keeps old and new in conversation.

Mosaic Floors and Raking Light

The dining room's red and ochre mosaic floor stays in place, and the white folding shutters do much of the atmospheric work. In late sun the light falls low across the tiles, the chair legs and the plaster walls, and the room shows its texture in a way no lighting plan could match.

Walnut and linen are well chosen against the tile. The warm wood holds its own next to the saturated floor, and the pale seats stop the composition from turning heavy.

Oak Passages Between Two Worlds

Leave the salons and the mood changes. Corridors are clad in dark timber panels, ceilings glow softly, and the walls curve toward the bedrooms. One view shows a narrow passage opening onto a sculpted plaster ceiling through a half-open pivot door, which sums up the project in one frame: new timber compression, then a release into the historic room.

Using darkness here is a bold choice in a city known for its light. It slows your movement and gives the private rooms a sense of arrival.

Curved Doors and Careful Thresholds

The curved oak door leaves are the most crafted gesture in the apartment. Where they meet the floor, herringbone parquet runs into a pale marble threshold, a detail that marks the boundary between circulation and room without needing a step or a change of colour.

These junctions are where an interior earns its credibility, and Balzar has clearly spent time on them.

Bedrooms Built Like Furniture

The bedrooms take the logic of the corridors and make it domestic. Low beds sit beneath recessed strips of warm light, fluted nightstands repeat the sideboard's rhythm, and a tall walnut wardrobe stands as a freestanding volume rather than being built into the old walls. Paneled shutters are kept, so the 1890 window remains legible even in the most contemporary rooms.

Art and textiles are kept to a few objects, such as a round canvas with a leaf-like shape and a shaggy cream rug. The rooms feel resolved rather than styled.

Travertine in the Wet Rooms

The bathrooms bring in stone as the third material. A travertine basin with a wall-mounted brass tap sits against oak panelling, a curved travertine shower alcove picks up the geometry of the doors, and recessed niches are cut directly into the stone. The curve does the same job here that it does in the corridors, softening a tight room and guiding you through it.

Plans and Drawings

The plan shows the dining room, living room, bedrooms and bathrooms arranged around a central stair core. Seen alongside the corridor photographs, it explains the apartment's two characters: the formal rooms sit along the facade with their windows and ornament, while the timber-lined zones take on the more awkward deep spaces near the core.

Why This Project Matters

Historic apartment renovations often either erase the ornament or turn the whole flat into a period piece. Ciutat Vella Apartment does neither. It places a clearly contemporary layer of oak, curves and controlled light next to the inherited plaster and tile, and allows each to stay itself. The building's 1890 identity remains intact in the rooms where it is strongest, and the new work goes where the old fabric had less to say.

For anyone working in dense historic centres, the lesson is about allocation rather than style. Decide which rooms keep their history, which rooms get a new voice, and then design the thresholds between them with real care. Balzar's curved doors and marble-to-parquet joints show that the junction between eras is where an interior like this succeeds or fails.

Ciutat Vella Apartment by Balzar Arquitectos (lead team Txema García Ballester and Laura Moreno Albuixech; design team Javier Fabado Saucedo; interior design Nekonato Gallery), València, Spain. Area: 200 m². Completed: 2025. Photography: David Zarzoso.

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