Frame House in Olabeaga neighborhood in Bilbao, seeks for a revitalizing strategy for transforming a convetional home away from the ‘real estate’ rules. Architects from BEAR & ACHA ZABALLA create a home scene for the plural and constantly changing daily moments. 

Frame House is a cleaning exercise, a search for the minimum, without asceticism, a vindication of the everyday, a piece of furniture, a curtain and four doors. 

The reform of a small apartment in the unique Bilbao neighborhood of Olabeaga serves as a pretext to seek a revitalizing strategy that, with a minimal budget, radically transforms a conventional home.

The intervention seeks to break away from the conventions that flood the real estate stock and that overcondition the use, especially of smaller homes.

Excess compartmentalization, small rooms, poor lighting, and monofunctional rooms whose conditions are not suitable for any of the uses or functions assigned to it.

Mutability as a project engine, understanding flexibility as a potential act that allows the house to become a continent adaptable to the changing needs of the new owners: telework, leisure, rest, music, social gatherings or cooking classes.

To do this a direct strategy, first eliminate everything overbuilt and then … the minimum. The minimum not as an image of complex realities embalmed with pure lines, the minimum as that only … the essential.

A clear and wide space, one that is one and there are several, connoted and mutable through a mobile system of sliding partitions, it is attached, separated or partially related, generating promiscuous and diffuse relationships. A space generous enough for each day a function.

A transformation towards a theatrical idea of ​​the everyday in which user-actionable mechanisms make up the home scene.

Every day a function; each house a theater.

Facts & Credits
Title Frame House
Typology Interior, Apartment
Location Bilbao, Bizkaia
Status Completed, 2021
Architecture Ane Arce, Iñigo Berasategui (BEAR), Cristina Acha, Miguel Zaballa (ACHA ZABALLA)
Photography Luis Díaz Díaz
Text by the authors

Take a look at another project by BEAR, “RABE, Space for architecture”, here!


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