Grizzo Studio Folds a Dental Clinic, a Home, and a Grand Piano into One Buenos Aires Facade

Most renovation projects begin with a single ambition: restore, or modernize. The Cervantes Building by Grizzo Studio refuses to pick one. The project layers a functioning dental office, a full residence, and a series of generous outdoor spaces into a single vertical section, then wraps the whole assembly in a material palette that treats heritage brick and industrial black steel as equal partners. The result is not a tidy before-and-after but a building that reads differently at every storey, from the reclaimed brick base to the cantilevered metal-clad volume that floats above the original roofline.

What makes this project genuinely compelling is its refusal to be polite about program. A grand piano sits in plain view from the street, perched above a clinical office lit by skylights, while behind the house a green-roofed pavilion faces a pool tucked against the garden wall. Each layer has its own spatial character, its own ceiling geometry, its own relationship to daylight. Grizzo Studio treats the vertical section as a storytelling device, and the stories are worth following.

A Facade That Stacks Its Arguments

The street elevation is a collage, but a disciplined one. At ground level, reclaimed brick and a black steel gate establish a tactile, grounded threshold. Above, a panel of terracotta tile and horizontal timber louvres introduce a second register, filtering light and view in ways that shift through the day. The top storey pushes forward in dark metal cladding, cantilevering over the quieter materials below and asserting itself against the neighbourhood's terracotta rooftops.

The genius of the composition is that each band corresponds to a distinct interior program. You can read the building's section from the sidewalk: clinic at grade, transitional living in the middle, and the primary social space elevated into the treetops. The grand piano visible through the upper terrace is not a decorative flourish but a legible signal that someone actually lives up there.

Dark Metal Against Old Tile

The dormer addition is the project's most assertive gesture. Clad in ribbed dark metal panels, it rises from the existing terracotta tile roof like a periscope, catching light and framing views of the surrounding tree canopy. A large glazed opening reveals the warm timber ceiling inside, collapsing the boundary between the new volume and its domestic program.

Grizzo Studio calibrates the contrast carefully. The metal is matte, not mirror-finish. The proportions of the dormer respect the pitch of the original roof even as they override its material logic. It reads as an addition, not an imposition, which is harder to achieve than it sounds.

Timber Vaults and Textured Concrete

Inside the upper residence, a curved timber plank ceiling defines the main dining and living sequence. The curve is not ornamental: it follows the structural geometry of the roof addition and brings the scale of the room down to something intimate, even though the glazing opens to a wide panorama of green canopy. Beneath the vaulted ceiling, textured board-formed concrete walls provide acoustic and visual weight, anchoring the lighter timber above.

The double-height living space is the project's vertical hinge. A steel mezzanine with an illuminated staircase connects the two domestic levels, and the concrete walls carry through to unify the section. A curved metal partition wraps the kitchen zone, introducing a sculptural element that separates preparation from gathering without closing off sightlines. The material choices are limited but deployed with enough variation in texture and finish to keep every surface legible.

Kitchen, Bath, and the Details That Land

The kitchen sits beneath the vaulted timber ceiling, organized around a black terrazzo island that provides a cool counterpoint to the warm wood above. A doorway opens directly onto a brick terrace, collapsing the distance between cooking and outdoor dining. The bathroom takes a different tonal approach: terracotta tile cladding, a cylindrical basin, and black metal trim produce a space that feels taut and deliberately composed.

Transitional spaces are handled with equal care. A hallway corner pairs grey stone wainscoting with white walls and a small potted plant, achieving the kind of quiet dignity that many residential projects overlook entirely. These moments confirm that the project's ambitions extend beyond the hero shots.

Clinic Below, Garden Behind

At ground level, the dental office occupies a bright, skylit volume with white cabinetry and a clinical calm that contrasts sharply with the warm domesticity upstairs. The separation is functional but also atmospheric: you move from the precision of healthcare into the textured warmth of a home simply by ascending a staircase.

At the rear, a green-roofed pavilion extends the living program into the garden, where a pool sits framed by the tiled roof extension and surrounding foliage. The rear elevation reveals just how much the building hides from the street: an entire landscape of leisure compressed behind the urban facade.

Brick, Steel, and the Art of the Planter

Two detail shots of the street-level planter boxes capture the project's approach to materiality in miniature. Reclaimed brick is set in steel frames, their joint lines precise and deliberate. Overhanging foliage softens the geometry without hiding it. These are small elements, but they do the heavy lifting of establishing the building's character before you ever step inside.

Why This Project Matters

The Cervantes Building Renovation matters because it demonstrates that mixed-use does not require a mixed-up identity. Grizzo Studio keeps the dental clinic, the residence, and the garden pavilion each spatially and materially distinct while binding them into a single coherent section. The vertical stacking is not a compromise forced by a tight lot but a deliberate strategy that gives every program its own relationship to light, view, and the street.

It also offers a persuasive model for working with Buenos Aires's existing fabric. Rather than mimicking heritage or bulldozing it, the studio treats the old roofline and brick walls as a datum from which new volumes can spring. The dark metal addition does not apologize for being new, but it also does not pretend the building started yesterday. That balance, sustained across scales from the urban silhouette down to a planter box, is what separates a thoughtful renovation from a cosmetic one.

Cervantes Building Renovation by Grizzo Studio, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photography by Federico Kulekdjian.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.