Since 1990, the year in which Teresa Sapey founded in Madrid the firm of architecture and design that bears her name, the studio has collected, one after the other, projects of international calibre, collaborations with artists and designers, awards and recognitions. At the base of every creation signed by Teresa Sapey + Partners, whether it is a hotel, a residential development, a showroom or an installation, is the notion that every intervention must serve as an added value.

Study, research and on site investigation inform these projects, where nothing is left to chance. Only this way real “haute couture spaces”, precious and handmade, just like the garments by the great couturiers, take on life. In this extensive interview we dialogue with Teresa Sapey and Francesca Heathcote Sapey about spaces and feelings, vitality and dynamism, colours and craftsmanship. Needless to say, there is no lack of novel projects.

In designing and creating spaces, we always try to respond to the needs and objectives of the client. In the case of the VIP Lounge of Arco 2020, the annual contemporary art fair of Madrid, the points to keep in mind were not only the context and type of customer, but also the fact that it was an area where people would have constantly returned in the course of four days. To answer this last point, we created different types of zones and defined diverse colour shades, so that both the space through the design and the user in the space were vital and dynamic.

Without any doubt, we would say “added value”. In this expression is inherent the understanding that architecture – which in this is distinguished from art – must always be justified. A customer can ask, for instance, for a whole blue house, and our job would be to understand what types of blue among all the existing ones are suitable for the different rooms of the house. Different is the case where the customer’s goal is to sell a greater number of products, as in the case of the Showroom of Gancedo, for which we have selected rather neutral tones because the customer in question sells fabrics, which were to be the protagonists and stand out against the background created by us. Behind every design there is therefore a discourse that seeks, through aesthetic and reasoned solutions, to bring added value to the final result.

The other keyword we would mention is “craftmanship”. By this, we mean to emphasize that we are not a studio aimed at use, but a creative laboratory where everything is made to measure. As an approach, each project is different, it always starts from scratch, from research, from fashioning specific containers, unique and not replicable. In this sense, we are a tailoring atelier for spaces.

We are currently working in Rome on a hotel project where, in addition to aesthetics, we are dealing with the cultural part. What cultural message can it bring? How can we convey the project’s Roman-ness? What will it communicate to its customers? How will it deal with the passing of time? Because a hotel, beyond maintenance, must fundamentally have a solid and durable structure. We try to answer all these questions, but always with theatrical strokes, as people are looking for the unicum, the custom-made garment indeed.

We start with the premise that also white is a colour. We have in fact managed several projects, especially private residences and villas, where the focus is on white shades. However, in reality, these are not “plain” whites, as we sometimes use whites tending to grey, warm whites, or whites with a hint of blue. Often. the human eye does not perceive such undertones, but overall the experience differs.

Nevertheless, our studio is well known also for the lively use of paint brush. When the studio was founded, several chromatic studies were made. We are not talking about colour at the level of personal taste, but at the level of experience, with a very clear purpose. In the Gancedo showroom, for instance, there is a gallery that corresponds to the emergency exit characterized by a flood of colours, articulated both vertically and at the floor level. Actually, not everyone gets to see it, but whoever arrives there will remember it perfectly.

Then, there are other projects, such as a recent proposal for workspaces, in which we adopted all the colour gamut of blues because it instils calm and concentration. Also in the Rotterdam hotel for Room Mate the inner courtyard is all blue. The project was in this latter case to recreate an ice-cold tropical garden and, since the ice is defined by blue shades, we selected specific gradations of light blue, deep blue and azure white. Again, there is an idea behind this. Specifically, we emptied the building to create a frozen garden so that all the rooms overlooking it could enjoy a view and our customer could rent them at the same price as the exterior facing rooms. Thus, there is always a reasoning, could it be economic, functional or experiential. Nothing is an end in itself.