Burrow budget home-studio reflects hidden zen garden & pond

With Madrid rents too high for young architects Ignacio and Pilar, they decided to turn their studio into a stealthy home. They buried the kitchen essentials - refrigerator, pantry - inside the walls of their workspace and added a second room to serve as their bedroom. To avoid drawing attention to the residential addition, they clad it in a reflective surface (methacrylate with a mirror finish) so it would take blend with the garden. The couple dubbed their home “The Burrow” both because of its stealth mode and because it is partially underground; they also call it “a lair, a hideout, a shelter”. Besides a small sliver window in the back, the bedroom’s only opening to the outside world is through a round, galvanized steel window, “the oculus”, “which reflects and blurs the incoming light”. There were originally two skylights on the structure, but 2021’s Storm Filomena - Spain’s largest snowstorm in 50 years - knocked a tree onto the home and broke the glass. The home itself withstood the in