MicroScale: Xstudio Reimagines a 32 m² Apartment in Gran Canaria as a Single Inhabited Room

MicroScale explores architecture at its most intimate spotlighting tiny designs with outsized ideas; compact structures that rethink space, material, and function. From tiny houses to pocket retail, these projects prove that small architecture can be radical, poetic, and deeply human, revealing how scale sharpens innovation rather than limiting it.

Xstudio reshapes a 32 m² apartment as an act of design care, delivering Casa C in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, as a single room we inhabit—a compact yet complete house where color, reflections, and light dissolve physical boundaries, opening views toward the sea, the horizon, and the depths of oneself.

We all have a room of our own. Like our names, shared with others, these rooms are inhabited in ways that make us uniquely ourselves. Rooms, like homes, carry the scent of lucid dreams, lingering hope, and traces of childhood. They are made of secret corners, hidden nooks, invisible alcoves: precious hideouts that allow living to breathe.

In House C, the room is artfully sculpted through two architectural devices conceived as inhabitable infrastructures.

A pale, dusty-pink linear block attached to the party wall hosts the rituals of everyday life: a sitting area that unfolds into a kitchen with a mirrored backdrop, and then into a bathing space conceived as a direct extension of the adjacent seascape.

A light emerald-green sleeping niche, draped with Klein-blue curtains, form the autonomous yet inseparable core of the house—a refuge for disconnection, relaxation, and dreams. 

The remaining surface of the dwelling is deliberately left flexible and non-hierarchical.

It adapts to changing uses and daily rituals, allowing the apartment to shift between living alone, meeting with others, and gazing into the seascape. Mirrored surfaces amplify the perception of space, multiplying reflections and pulling the sea into the interior.

Through these overlaps, light and horizon are transformed into active architectural elements.

By compressing living into a single, fluid room, the project demonstrates how reduced scale can heighten perception, intensify ritual, and offer quiet, poetic opportunities for living.

Drawings

Facts & Credits
Project title  House C
Typology  Interiors, Apartment renovation, Residential
Location  Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
Built Area  32m²
Status  Completed, 2025
Architecture  Xstudio
Lead Architects  Leticia Romero, Ancor Suárez
Photography  David Rodríuez