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Edificio Viciana shows how a difficult urban parcel can support three related households without giving up privacy, daylight, or a shared family life. Fernández-Llebrez Arquitectura fitted three apartments across four floors on a deep, irregular site in Valencia’s historic center. The couple who commissioned it and the families of their two adult children moved from three suburban houses, according to David Cohn’s feature in Architectural Record published October 13, 2025. Their new home concentrates daily life around a continuous front-to-back living zone in each apartment and a roof terrace shared by everyone.
The project is less a single oversized dwelling than a small vertical neighborhood. Shifting party walls, an off-axis rear patio, a regulated historic facade, archaeological remains, and a narrow access passage all shaped the design. The result combines separate household floors with carefully chosen points of contact: a common roof, planted courts, a basement workspace, and views toward Valencia’s historic towers.
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Edificio Viciana is a completed residence in a quiet old quarter of Valencia, surrounded by small plazas and historic buildings. Architectural Record reports a total project size of 14,050 square feet, completed in May 2025. The building contains three apartments over four floors for one couple and the families of their two adult children. The publication does not report a project cost.
Project at a glance
| Item | Reported detail |
|---|---|
| Location | Valencia, Spain, in the historic center |
| Architect | Fernández-Llebrez Arquitectura; José Fernández-Llebrez is identified as design lead |
| Households | A couple and the families of their two adult children |
| Organization | Three apartments across four floors |
| Project size | 14,050 square feet, as reported by Architectural Record in 2025 |
| North facade | Approximately 30 feet wide |
| Completion | May 2025 |
| Cost | Not stated by the publication |
The family’s decision to sell three suburban homes is presented as a move toward proximity and city life. That motivation is attributed to the Architectural Record feature rather than independently reported interviews. The architecture translates that wish for closeness into shared amenities while retaining a legible home for each household.
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Why the narrow, irregular site mattered
The parcel is deep and eccentric rather than a simple rectangle. Its party walls shift, and the rear patio sits off-axis from the roughly 30-foot-wide northern facade. On such a site, a conventional central corridor would consume scarce width and leave rooms dependent on borrowed light. The architects instead made the main living space itself the organizing device.
A continuous room from street to patio
In every apartment, the kitchen, living room, and dining area run from front to back. Architectural Record says this arrangement assures cross ventilation. It also establishes a clear visual and social axis through each floor: residents move through one connected sequence rather than a chain of isolated rooms. Bedrooms and service spaces can sit to the sides, while the principal room benefits from openings at both ends.
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Geometry eased with curves and steel
Rounded corners absorb the changing angles of the party walls and make movement through the plan less abrupt. Two pairs of structural steel columns help carry the building while allowing the open living zones to remain continuous. The feature reports that Fernández-Llebrez said the columns helped keep structural costs down. That is a design and construction observation, not a published cost comparison or a claim that the entire project was inexpensive.
A regulated facade and an unusual entrance
Historic-district rules required traditional balcony windows on the facade. A large oak door opens to a hydraulic platform serving the basement garage, so the vehicle entrance occupies much of the north elevation. Because the living spaces take up the rest of that side, the pedestrian entrance and vertical circulation are approached from the opposite direction, at the end of a narrow private passage that opens near a plaza.
The passage is identified in the feature as an atzucat, a term of Islamic origin. It is not merely a service route: planting and reused historic tiles turn it into an arrival space. The arrangement separates cars from everyday foot traffic and lets the family enter through a quieter, more intimate threshold.
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How three households share one building
Each family occupies a floor, creating a straightforward division between households. The arrangement provides a private domestic base for each unit while keeping the building’s major communal destination above them. The parents live in a top-floor duplex that opens directly onto the large roof terrace shared by all three households.
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This vertical strategy avoids the ambiguity that can arise when several generations share one oversized plan. A family can close its apartment and maintain its own routines, storage, and sleeping areas. Contact happens by choice at the terrace, in the planted passage, or in the outdoor courts rather than through a mandatory common living room.
The top-floor duplex gives the older generation the closest direct relationship to the roof terrace, while the other apartments remain connected by the building’s vertical circulation. The available reporting does not specify bedroom counts, accessibility provisions, or the exact location of every apartment entrance, so those details should not be inferred from the published description.
Circulation as a social filter
Approaching the building through the atzucat creates a gradual transition from public plaza to private life. Inside, the open living axis brings daylight and air through the depth of each apartment. The sequence distinguishes three levels of interaction: the city at the plaza, the family’s shared outdoor rooms, and each household’s own apartment.
The roof terrace is the family’s outdoor living room
Architectural Record calls the shared roof terrace the family’s primary gathering space. Its dimensions are not given as a total area, but its features make its role clear. A 25-foot swimming pool forms the largest single element. A mature lemon tree stands in lavender, and a wood-burning brick oven, or paellero, supports the Valencian tradition of cooking paella together.
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The terrace looks toward the dome of a 19th-century chapel and the tower of a Romanesque church. Those views make the roof a place of orientation as well as recreation. José Fernández-Llebrez described the surrounding historic buildings this way:
“They seem to be on top of you,” he said. “You hear the bells as if you were inside the tower. The clients love it,”
The feature also reports that the clients picked lemons from the tree for gin and tonics. That anecdote shows how the terrace is expected to support ordinary family rituals, not just formal entertaining.
Courts, passages, and the rear patio
The roof is only one part of the outdoor network. Two 10-foot-square courts serve bedrooms and bathrooms, bringing open air and daylight to rooms that could otherwise face party walls. Their compact dimensions make them practical light wells and private outlooks rather than miniature gardens intended for large gatherings.
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The planted atzucat
Ferns and ivy are intended to cover the party walls in the atzucat. Five small cypress trees mark the passage, giving the route a vertical rhythm as residents walk from the plaza toward the entrance. The planting softens the hard edges of the historic surroundings without pretending that the narrow passage is a conventional courtyard.
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The rear patio and basement workspace
At the back, a rear patio extends the building’s shared outdoor sequence. A mature cypress grows in a light well at the end of the patio. The patio also connects a basement workspace to the outdoors, an important distinction in a multigenerational home where work, storage, hobbies, or support activities may need separation from the apartments. The source does not identify the workspace’s exact program or operating schedule.
Materials give the interiors a calm, continuous character
The interior palette relies on a limited set of robust-looking elements: sand-colored limestone flooring, custom millwork, hidden kitchen services, minimalist island blocks, and matte off-black metalwork. The reported ceilings in the main rooms reach as high as 13 feet. Together, these choices reinforce the long open living spaces created by the site plan.
Concealing kitchen services keeps the continuous room visually quiet when cooking is not the focus. Island blocks provide a fixed point for food preparation and informal conversation without introducing full-height partitions. Limestone carries through circulation areas, while the dark metalwork supplies contrast at stairs, openings, and other details. These are descriptions of the published design, not evidence of independently tested durability or environmental performance.
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Mandatory archaeological excavations uncovered an 11th-century Islamic patio with a well-preserved hexagonal tiled fountain. Architectural Record reports that the fountain was claimed for a public collection under Spanish law. The article’s legal description is presented here as reported; the governing law and collection process have not been independently analyzed.
Not every discovery was removed from the project. Some blue-and-white tiles from a 15th-century patio were allowed to be reused in the atzucat. Their placement gives the arrival passage a direct material link to earlier domestic life on the site.
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In the basement, a Roman well is displayed beneath glass beside several amphoras from the client’s collection. The display turns the lowest level into an architectural timeline: Roman infrastructure, Islamic water and garden traditions, later historic construction, and a contemporary family residence occupy one address. The artifacts are integrated as reminders of continuity rather than treated as decorative replicas.
Design decisions that make the arrangement work
Edificio Viciana offers a useful set of principles for anyone studying multigenerational housing on a constrained urban site.
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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minute- Stack households vertically. Giving each family a defined apartment protects autonomy while allowing shared facilities to be concentrated where they are most useful.
- Make the best room do several jobs. The front-to-back kitchen, living, and dining space supports cooking, meals, conversation, and air movement without a corridor consuming the plan.
- Use outdoor rooms at different scales. The roof terrace handles large gatherings; the courts serve bedrooms and bathrooms; the atzucat manages arrival; and the rear patio gives the basement workspace an external connection.
- Separate vehicles from people. The hydraulic garage platform takes the required vehicle access at the facade, while the pedestrian route uses the quieter passage from the nearby plaza.
- Let structure respond to the plan. Rounded corners and paired steel columns accommodate irregular walls while preserving an open interior and, according to the architect as quoted, helping control structural costs.
- Preserve evidence of earlier uses selectively. Reusing some tiles and displaying the Roman well acknowledges the site’s history without freezing the entire building as an archaeological exhibit.
Project team and reported credits
Fernández-Llebrez Arquitectura led the project. The team listed in the feature includes Patricia García Martínez, Lucía González Suárez, Carmen Ferri Pardo, and Alicia Adelantado Fernández. Josep Ramon Solé Marzo handled structural and geotechnical engineering, and Juan Manuel Sánchez Rodríguez handled mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineering. Remedios Martínez García served as archaeological consultant, AT4 as general contractor, and Edificio Viciana as client.
Reported supplier credits include Cechi Tapiceros for entrances; Madentia for wood and sliding elements; Mobalco for millwork; Nerinea for stone flooring; Isaval for paint; Otis for car and passenger elevators; and Oli, Ritmonio, Fontealta, and Inbani for plumbing. These are project credits, not endorsements or evidence of product performance beyond this building.
What is—and is not—established about performance and cost
The published account provides dimensions, materials, program, and completion timing, but it does not provide energy-use data, water consumption, carbon calculations, operating costs, post-occupancy evaluations, or independent environmental testing. The 14,050-square-foot area, 25-foot pool length, 30-foot facade width, two 10-foot-square courts, four-floor arrangement, and May 2025 completion date are project-description figures, not performance statistics.
Cost is withheld. No defensible estimate can be derived from the feature’s description, and the presence of custom work, archaeological obligations, structural interventions, and a basement garage makes a simple area-based assumption especially unreliable.
Why this infill house matters
Edificio Viciana demonstrates that multigenerational urban living does not require one undifferentiated communal interior. The building gives each household a recognizable home, then concentrates togetherness in a roof terrace, planted thresholds, and carefully placed outdoor rooms. Its irregular geometry is treated as a generator of light, ventilation, and movement rather than an obstacle to hide.
Just as important, the project does not erase Valencia’s layered past. Historic facade rules shape the street presence, an Islamic patio and 15th-century tiles inform the entrance, and a Roman well remains visible below. Contemporary family life is therefore fitted into an existing urban and archaeological record. The architecture’s achievement lies in making those constraints support one another: privacy above, gathering at the roof, air through the plan, and history underfoot.
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