De la Riva Sherry Homes: A Bodega Reborn in Jerez

Jerez de la Frontera is one of those Spanish cities whose identity is defined by a single product. In Jerez, the product is sherry, and the buildings that produced it for two centuries, the bodegas, sit in the centre of town like the cathedrals of an industry. Most of them are abandoned. De la Riva Sherry Homes, completed in 2025 by Juan Vega Arquitectos, is a project that asks what to do with these buildings now that the wine has moved on.

The answer here is residential. The architects have transformed two historic sherry bodegas into 45 homes within 7,400 square metres of carefully restored and newly inserted space. The result is one of the more thoughtful adaptive reuse projects to come out of southern Spain in recent years.

A Bodega Is Not a House

The challenge of converting a sherry bodega is that it was never designed for people to live in. Bodegas are tall, dim, single-volume halls with thick whitewashed walls and small high windows. They were built to keep wine cool and stable, not to receive sunlight or accommodate kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms.

The architects' first move was to leave the most distinctive parts of the original buildings alone. The white gable walls, the tiled roofs, the rhythm of openings on the long facades, and the historic chimney of the neighbouring distillery are all preserved. From the street, the project still reads as a piece of Jerez's industrial heritage, not as a new development pretending to be old.

The Garden as Mediator

Around the bodega, a low white wall and a planted garden of stipa grasses, olive trees, and Mediterranean species mediate between the historic building and the surrounding streets. This is a soft edge, not a fence. It signals private use without being defensive.

This kind of landscape treatment matters in adaptive reuse projects. A new perimeter wall around an old building is the moment most conversions get wrong. They either over-secure it or leave it exposed. The white wall here, slightly curved, deliberately low, and softened by planting, gets it right.

The Pool and the Industrial Backdrop

On one edge of the site, a small lap pool and terrace face the original brick chimney of the neighbouring industrial complex. The image is striking: a quiet residential moment framed by a piece of nineteenth-century industry. The architects could have hidden the chimney. They chose to make it the view.

The Vaulted Entrance

The shared entrance hall is the project's most theatrical moment. A vaulted ceiling, a tiered crystal chandelier, and a planted reflecting box at the far end give the lobby a ceremonial weight that is unusual for a residential project. Interior design by Cask Studio handles this without tipping into hotel cliche.

The lobby works because it does not pretend the building is new. The vaulted ceiling and the original sandstone surfaces are still visible. The chandelier and the contemporary furniture are layered on top, not pretending to belong to the same era.

Courtyards Inside the Bodega

Inside the bodega volumes, the architects cut a series of courtyards to bring light and air into the residential floors. These are framed by arched openings that mirror the geometry of the original facade and by dark vertical timber screens that allow ventilation while maintaining privacy.

This is the project's defining gesture. The courtyards take what was a single dim industrial hall and break it into a sequence of inhabitable outdoor rooms, each one feeling like a small private patio in the middle of a much larger building.

The Inner Alleys

Between the residential blocks, narrow alleys run the full length of the bodega. They are covered in places by exposed timber beams and open in others to the sky. They function as the project's main circulation, but they also work as outdoor rooms. The geometry, with arched openings cut into the dark slatted facades, is closer to a hill town than a contemporary apartment building.

The Slatted Facade

The new residential blocks inserted into the bodega use a vertical timber slat facade that is both contemporary and quietly responsive to the climate. The slats filter direct sun, allow cross ventilation, and create the kind of dappled shadow that is essential in Andalusian summers. They also keep the new architecture visually distinct from the historic walls without being aggressive about it.

The slats are dark, almost black, which sets them clearly against the whitewashed historic walls and the original sandstone bases. The contrast is the point. You can read the building's history at a glance: white walls and tile roofs from the nineteenth century, dark timber facades from the twenty-first.

Inside the Homes

Inside the units, the architects kept the original timber roof structures and exposed sandstone columns wherever they could. New elements (steel stairs, white walls, contemporary fixtures) are clearly modern but proportionally restrained. The result is interiors that feel new without erasing the building's age.

The double-height living spaces with their original beams are the most distinctive rooms in the project. They are also the hardest to design well, because the temptation is to over-furnish them. The photographs show them empty, which is a deliberate choice. They demonstrate that the architecture is doing the work.

The Roof Terraces

Some units include private roof terraces tucked between the original gable walls. The arched openings, with their dark grilles, frame views of the surrounding city. These are the kind of spaces that only become possible in a conversion. You cannot design them from scratch. They emerge from the constraints of an existing building, and they are usually the best rooms in the project.

Drawings

The two axonometric drawings make the strategy clear. The existing bodega is preserved as a continuous shell. The new residential blocks are inserted as separate volumes within it, with courtyards and alleys carved out between them. The intervention is additive but legible.

Why This Project Matters

Adaptive reuse is the most important conversation in contemporary architecture. The carbon cost of demolishing and rebuilding old industrial structures is enormous, and most cities have far more historic stock than they can afford to replace. Projects like De la Riva Sherry Homes prove that conversion can be more interesting than new build, not less.

The lessons here are transferable to any city with industrial heritage that no longer serves its original purpose: preserve the parts that give the building its identity, cut courtyards to bring light into deep volumes, treat the new insertions as clearly contemporary rather than fake-historic, and use materials that age the way the original walls have. Juan Vega Arquitectos has put together one of the more complete examples of this approach in Spain right now.

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Project credits: De la Riva Sherry Homes by Juan Vega Arquitectos. Jerez de la Frontera, Spain. 7,400 m². Completed 2025. Principal architect: Juan Vega. Technical team: María Gonzalez Baro, Paola Domouso, Gonzalo Herrero. Interior design: Cask Studio. Structure: Estructura2. Photographs: Fernando Alda.