For over five years ICESA searched for a property that matched a specific set of constraints: central location, family budget, and a commitment to reducing environmental footprint. The area around La Sabana had undergone heavy speculation following mid-rise development — new flats too small or too expensive for families, with the default alternative being gated communities on greenfield land further out. Neither was acceptable to the client.

The solution was an investment model built around an abandoned house: convert it into four apartments, one for the owners, the rest as rentals whose income offsets the cost of staying central. Shared occupancy also improves security. The house had no architectural value and had suffered years of deterioration and theft, but the brief was self-imposed and clear — work within the existing footprint or reduce it, reuse whatever could be saved, and improve natural light and ventilation where the original building failed.

The result is four apartments across one, two, and three-bedroom configurations. All but one receive natural light from two cardinal directions; all but one have high wooden ceilings with roof clerestories. Original wall and floor tiles were kept wherever intact, and a neutral palette in new finishes — tiles, render, furniture — was chosen to work with the existing variety rather than override it.

The largest apartment, Cuatro, fits three bedrooms into what was the original kitchen plus a small new mezzanine above it, accessed by a steel stair behind salvaged corrugated polycarbonate. The main bedroom opens to a terrace with views to the mountains and the street; the living area gains a side patio and a more permeable facade toward the backyard. Most of Cuatro’s furniture is reused, including restored solid wood pieces by local architects Franz Beer and Jorge Bertheau — the former also a principal at ICESA.

At street level, the original retaining walls had failed under soil pressure and root growth. The replacement wall was set back under the building facade rather than at the property line, raising the facade, improving seismic performance, and opening the transition from sidewalk to entrance.