The entrance reconfiguration establishes the methodology before the interior opens. Rather than building additional walls to create a threshold between the street and the social spaces of the house, AMASA Estudio designed a custom millwork system, a continuous wooden element running floor to ceiling that integrates storage, filters direct views from the street, and sequences the arrival without any new construction. The piece does the work of architecture through furniture, compressing the entry in a way that makes the subsequent openness of the plan legible. The studio developed a comparable intelligence around thresholds and domestic transition zones in two previous Coyoacán projects, Casa Sofia and a residence for painter Daniela Riquelme.

Vertical circulation was rebuilt from scratch in a way that reveals the project’s structural intelligence. The main staircase handles the connection between the ground and first floors. A new cantilevered steel stair, painted in the same sage green that runs through all the ironwork of the house, resolves access to the rooftop terrace independently, anchored by a single structural beam and requiring no intermediate columns that would otherwise fragment the patios below. The result is a circulation system in which each level connects to the next without interrupting the spatial quality of the one below, and the rooftop terrace arrives as a natural consequence of the section rather than an afterthought added on top. The spiral stair with its perforated metal treads sits against the red brick lattice wall, the geometry of the stair and the geometry of the screen in deliberate dialogue.

The material argument at Casa Xoltic is the project’s most explicitly stated position. AMASA Estudio identified a specific condition in contemporary Mexican residential architecture: the overuse of chukum and mineral plasters across domestic, cultural, and commercial spaces has produced a homogenization of surfaces, buildings that could be anywhere, expressing nothing particular about their location. The studio’s response was not to refuse the material but to delimit it. Chukum appears only where its technical properties justify its use, on facades, patios, the rooftop terrace, bathrooms, and the kitchen. In dry interior spaces, smooth domestic plaster creates a quieter and more contained atmosphere, the surfaces receding so that the millwork, the column, the furniture, and the light become the elements that define the room.

His central argument was that the correct response to a constrained footprint is not cleverness but clarity. The project did not add a single centimeter of floor area. What it did was remove everything that was preventing the space from working. Every partition wall came down to produce a single continuous volume. The mezzanine was reimagined as a sleeping platform integrated with the floor below, creating a unified spatial experience rather than two separate rooms. Once the vertical dimension was free to operate, the nearly five-meter Catalan vault became the primary architectural element of the apartment rather than an obscured irrelevance, and the plan resolved itself around that fact.

The staircase connecting the two levels was designed and fabricated by the studio in phenolic pine plywood, with storage integrated under every tread. The handrail is a single blue-painted tubular steel rod detailed to the minimum section so that the sightline between the floor and mezzanine remains uninterrupted. The kitchen uses an IKEA METOD framework fronted with panels from the Madrid-based manufacturer CUBRO in a warm greige tone, circular green dot pulls at every cabinet and drawer, a custom stainless steel countertop, and a yellow backsplash with a grey undulating wave border at its lower edge fabricated by Plecoart. Above the upper cabinets, a series of blue tube lights formed into repeated arch shapes runs the full length of the kitchen, the motif appearing at enough frequency to read as a pattern. Square white mosaic tiles from CE.SI. line the wet zone, their small grid in deliberate geometric dialogue with the circular pulls throughout. The same tile carries into the bathroom below the mezzanine, maintaining material continuity across both wet areas so that the flat reads as a single considered object rather than a sequence of rooms handled independently. Storage is available throughout the home, under the stairs, in the PAX wardrobe system with CUBRO fronts, and along the built-in shelving in the living area.

The apartment sits in a historic seafront villa known locally as the Blondet house, part of an early twentieth-century development 12.5 meters from the beach. It was commissioned by Erika and Morgan, a family from Orange County, California, who chose Levanto specifically for its distance from the Cinque Terre crowds rather than proximity to them. The studio described the town’s appeal in its own words: “Levanto feels alive. Alive with year-round residents, with families who have been coming to the sea for generations.” The original polychrome marble entrance ramp, including locally quarried Levanto red marble, was kept intact and became the starting point from which the rest of the interior builds.

That same wood shifts character depending on where it lands. In the living and kitchen zones, it’s precise and restrained, closer to nautical joinery than domestic cabinetry. In the children’s room, it loosens considerably: curved bunk bed profiles, rope netting strung across the upper level, a deep blue painted ceiling, and metal support brackets shaped to reference surfboard fins. llabb began as a carpentry workshop before it became an architecture practice, and this room is where that history shows through most clearly.

The two bathrooms take deliberately different directions. The master bathroom leans darker and more controlled, with a Rexa space-saving washbasin and black metal fittings. The second bathroom is warmer, built around a custom travertine washbasin designed by llabb with an oak base made by Falegnameria Ratto in Genoa. Both stay within the same material logic as the rest of the apartment rather than treating finishes as a separate decision.

Getting five cylinders to sit comfortably on a hillside meant cutting each one obliquely at the top, which does more than one job at once. The angled cuts let the volumes settle into the slope without heavy excavation or retaining walls, and at roof level they resolve into a pitched form, a typology the region more or less expects, while each cut faces a slightly different direction depending on which volume it belongs to. That variation isn’t just a formal flourish. Because each cylinder’s angled roof captures light from its own orientation, the bedrooms, the living spaces, and the wellness volume all end up tuned to different daylight conditions rather than sharing one uniform pitch across the whole house, a calibration the studio has approached before, in a different climate, on its WELL-certified Camiral House in Girona.

The house also opens toward the Sierra de Guadarrama, though the more interesting decisions happen at the scale of each volume rather than the house as a whole. Two of the cylinders get their own private courtyards, shielded from wind and outside view, while a third opens directly onto a terrace instead. It’s a strategy the studio has tested elsewhere, distributing privacy and exposure unevenly across a plan rather than treating the whole house as a single gesture, as in its Villa 95 in Sotogrande. The same instinct, resolving issues cylinder by cylinder rather than house by house, also carries through the roof cuts and the courtyard, and reappears in the studio’s Villa 18 in La Moraleja, suggesting that it is less an isolated choice here and more a working method to which the practice keeps returning.