Casa Gesso is a minimal home located in Valencia, Spain, designed by Viruta Lab. Casa Gesso, the latest work from Viruta Lab, transforms the conventional language of domestic architecture into something more provocative: a spatial dialogue with feminist art history. What makes this project remarkable isn’t just its technical sophistication, but how it reimagines the home as a vehicle for cultural memory and social critique.

The project’s genius lies in how it materializes the abstract. Studio founders David Puerta and María Daroz have taken García Codoñer’s challenging 1970s feminist artwork – particularly her “Morfologías,” “Misses,” and “Labores” series – and translated them into architectural gestures that both shelter and provoke. Consider the master bedroom’s headboard, where a Chanel-style tweed pattern does double duty: it references both the superficial glamour of beauty pageants that García Codoñer critiqued in her “Misses” series, while its careful patterning echoes traditional women’s handicrafts. This layering of meaning through material choice exemplifies how architecture can carry cultural memory forward.

The home’s spatial organization reveals equally thoughtful consideration. Two distinct volumes negotiate the transition between different urban scales, while an interior courtyard serves as the heart of the home. This courtyard, with its vertical porcelain tile cladding, becomes a contemporary interpretation of García Codoñer’s “Morfologías” series, where questions about female body representation in art find new expression in architectural form. The sinuous forms and careful modulation of light create spaces that both comfort and challenge.

Materials play a crucial role in this narrative. The bone-colored porcelain tiles that clad the exterior recall traditional artists’ washhouses, creating a thread between past and present. Inside, the interplay of natural wood, travertine marble, and microcement speaks to a material palette that bridges domestic comfort with artistic intention. The custom-designed rocking chairs and rugs by Viruta Lab add another layer, their handcrafted nature echoing the themes of women’s work explored in García Codoñer’s “Labores” series.