May 12, 2024Whether it was to encourage productivity, or to explain his paper-strewn desk, my father often repeated, “If you want to get something done, give it to a busy person.” That age-old proverb could be the motto of Casa Muñoz.
This white-hot Madrid interior design studio — founded a decade ago by the young married talents Mafalda Muñoz and Gonzalo Machado and recently named one of the 1stDibs 50 — is busy these days getting things done. Besides conceiving the interiors of a new luxury hotel set to open in their home city in 2025 and a private members club called Forbes House launching there later this year, they’re also debuting a lighting collection for the Belgian brand Authentage and creating furniture and accessories for both their own label, Casa Muñoz Editions, and Darro, a Spanish furniture company founded in the mid-20th-century by Muñoz’s father, the celebrated Spanish decorator Paco Muñoz. They’ve based their Darro pieces on ones Paco created for the firm in the 1950s.
On their plates as well is the much-anticipated reopening, on May 17, of the Machado-Muñoz gallery. Showcasing everything from antiquities to contemporary designs, it will be in a new location, near their office and home in Madrid’s Justicia neighborhood. The original gallery, which shuttered during the pandemic, was considered groundbreaking for its striking exhibitions of art and objects. “We mix pieces we have a crush on,” Muñoz says.
All these other projects will not distract the couple from crafting the seductively elegant, nuanced residential interiors that have kept the bustling Casa Muñoz in high demand with clients around the globe. A recent project — their second in Gstaad, Switzerland, where Casa Muñoz opened an office and showroom in 2019 — reflects their thoughtful, highly refined approach to crafting spaces that look at once refreshingly modern and layered with history.
Their goal here was to create the feeling of an old mountain chalet in a newly constructed three-bedroom apartment, the primary home of their real estate developer client. They began by cladding the floors and many of the walls with reclaimed wood and adding a massive built-in custom cabinet on one end of the living area that recalls an antique country armoire. A sumptuous double-sided sofa of their own design allows the homeowner to enjoy the mountain views during the day and relax by the fireplace at night.
To infuse the room with a sense of the past, they paired a rustic wood cocktail table by the modernist designer Janette Laverrière with a shapely armchair attributed to mid-century Danish designer Flemming Lassen. A circular ceiling pendant by Gino Sarfatti illuminates a 1950s French dining table surrounded by vintage Maxime Old chairs. A bespoke coppery rug brings warmth to the open space.
“We tried to get away from the classic white carpet that you find in every house in Switzerland, which is logical, as everyone takes their shoes off, but we already did that in our first Gstaad project,” Machado explains with a laugh. “Many of our decisions come from the gut — they just feel right.”
Closer to home, working on a house on the outskirts of central Madrid, Muñoz and Machado found inspiration in the neighborhood’s history. Blocks of detached houses, each with a little garden, had been built here in the 1930s in a clean-lined Viennese style. But over the decades, homes like this one had acquired an English cottage look.
Casa Muñoz’s gut renovation included ridding the rooms of patterned floor tiles and other decorative flourishes and transforming the garage into a kitchen and breakfast room. Finding a Bakelite door handle they admired on the entrance of a building in the neighborhood, they used it as a model for all the brass hardware in the house.” “It wasn’t as easy as using something from a catalogue,” Muñoz says. “But now it’s part of our design collection.”
The sparsely furnished yet perfectly balanced living room features a mahogany and leather sofa by Frits Henningsen, which they purchased on 1stDibs and grouped with a Paavo Tynell Edition floor lamp by Gubi and an IKB glass cocktail table by Yves Klein, topped with an antique Chinese horse sculpture. Adjacent to this grouping is their bespoke interpretation of a sectional sofa, covered in an alluring bronze-colored mohair velvet and equipped with an integrated marble-top cocktail table. “The rooms in these kinds of houses are small — we didn’t want to have a huge cocktail table,” Muñoz says. “We wanted more space, more air.”
Interior designers often use their own homes as laboratories in which to test combinations of furnishings and color palettes and show potential clients how they conjure room settings with an array of personal objects. Machado and Muñoz’s Madrid residence is no exception. The couple shares a stately second-floor apartment in a 1900 building boasting impressively high ceilings with their young children, Paco and Maxima. “It’s a constantly evolving space where we feel free to try different ideas and make mistakes,” Muñoz says. “Every three weeks we have different armchairs in the living room.”
For now, the living room features a pair of pedestal leather chairs by Javier Carvajal, a 19th-century octagonal cocktail table, an Art Deco games table, a large-scale painting by Antonio Ballester Moreno and an earthy hanging textile by the Catalan artist Aurèlia Muñoz (no relation to Mafalda) acquired from her estate. Their bedroom, meanwhile, is filled with an eclectic assortment of treasures, including a pair of stainless-steel shelves designed by Muñoz’s father that displays 11th-century Italian sculptures of bishops, a Joe Colombo armchair they bought at auction and a Josef Hoffmann chair paired with a checkerboard-painted Vienna Secession desk. In their bathroom, a custom-made cerused-oak vanity and ebonized wall cabinetry have the look of antiques.
Their approach to designing any home is always the same: making decisions that just “feel right,” Muñoz says:
“For every project, we look at what the place is, what is going to happen in those rooms, and try not to impose our style. We’ve done everything from a house in Ibiza that’s all blue tiles and white walls to an aluminum box in Madrid. But what we always apply are layers and depth — different textures, books, ceramics — everything you need to feel like it’s a home.”
