From Fixed Rooms to Flexible Domestic Spaces
Adaptable interiors are domestic environments planned to change over time, where movable room systems, modular furniture design, and fluid boundaries replace rigid walls so that spaces can shift with seasons, routines, and relationships instead of locking inhabitants into a single, static layout.
The main story in contemporary domestic design is not about adding more rooms; it is about weakening the power of the room altogether. Barcelona and New York-based studio TAKK, founded by Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño, has built its practice on the suspicion that the corridor-and-room model we inherit from the bourgeois home is historical, not natural. TAKK organizes housing around climate, intimacy, care and coexistence, arguing that the house “does not only respond to a way of living; it also produces it”. In parallel, project CASA NM3 in Milan constructs an interior without fixed walls, using movable partitions to outline rooms while keeping their limits soft and reversible. Together, these experiments insist that domestic comfort today is less about enclosure than about the freedom to reconfigure.
TAKK: Comfort as an Adaptable Interior Layout
TAKK’s work is a direct challenge to the idea that a home is a container of static functions. Instead of counting bedrooms, the studio treats housing as “an infrastructure for coexistence rather than a container of functions,” deciding first which relationships and forms of care should be visible. Earlier forms of habitation were more mobile, with occupants drifting toward sun in winter and shade in summer depending on time of day; TAKK reads this as a blueprint for flexible domestic spaces. In its domestic experiments, privacy appears as gradients rather than hard doors, activities overlap, and parts of the home become more or less inhabitable depending on season or temperature.
This stance is political as much as spatial. Families fragment and recombine, work spills into the bedroom, pets gain almost-human status, summers get hotter and energy more expensive, yet housing still arrives neatly sliced into specialized rooms and corridors. TAKK asks who this “standard home” was designed for, noting that contemporary households and other beings refuse to resemble the tidy nuclear family behind twentieth-century plans. The studio’s answer is to propose homes that are more adaptable, seasonal, and actively connected to climate rather than uniformly conditioned boxes. Its curation of the Catalan Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2025 extends this agenda beyond single apartments, signaling that rethinking domestic space is a cultural project, not a niche experiment.
CASA NM3: When Furniture Becomes Architecture
CASA NM3 arrives in Milan during Salone del Mobile 2026 as a controlled rethinking of the domestic interior, building a home without fixed walls and replacing enclosure with movable partitions that sketch four rooms without ever fully defining them. Here, the usual hierarchy is flipped: instead of stable architecture containing loose objects, furniture becomes the architecture while curtains and light structures act almost like movable room systems. Within this framework, NM3’s objects evolve into modular furniture design systems, with the NM25 and NM26 series introducing full modularity that extends across kitchens, desks and other elements.
This approach matters because it lets ordinary residents reorganize their homes without structural renovation, responding to changing work schedules, visiting friends or new family constellations by sliding partitions and recombining pieces. According to the designers of CASA NM3, “the greatest ambition of architecture is to dissolve into its urban context, like the Blur paintings by Gerhard Richter,” a thought that guides their preference for quiet, scalable systems over expressive one-off objects. The result is an adaptable interior layout that holds together without permanence, where boundaries shift and the idea of a room becomes fluid.
Stainless Steel, Memory and the Aesthetics of Flexibility
If movable partitions provide the spatial skeleton in CASA NM3, materials and personal objects give flexible domestic spaces their emotional weight. Stainless steel, left untreated and precise, sets the overall atmosphere. It usually reads as industrial or cold, yet the designers rely on its capacity to blur into different contexts: the same modules hold kitchens, desks and other domestic systems while staying coherent as architecture. They argue that these pieces become part of the home through daily use, turning functional objects into an intimate infrastructure over time.
To resist a showroom-like neutrality, the installation adds personal objects and textiles so that the space is “contaminated” by real life. Ordinary belongings mark the stainless-steel framework, proving that a controlled, abstract grid can host messy routines and memory. This is not a minor aesthetic choice: it is evidence that flexible systems do not have to strip away character. CASANM3’s designers say they avoid treating creativity as the starting point of a project, instead beginning with production constraints so the work gains consistency. In practice, that philosophy keeps the environment intentional but livable, aligning modular furniture design with the disorder of everyday life rather than fighting it.
Why Movable Room Systems Belong in Everyday Homes
Both TAKK and CASA NM3 show that the corridor-and-room home is less an eternal standard than a habit ripe for replacement. Designing housing around climate, intimacy and coexistence makes sense in a world where households change form, work migrates across surfaces, and energy use becomes a central concern. Movable room systems and modular furniture design allow privacy to be tuned, spaces to overlap, and zones to be opened or closed according to hour or season without calling a contractor. For ordinary residents, that is not an abstract benefit: it means a living room can become a studio today and a shared bedroom tomorrow, while the same stainless-steel modules quietly keep the interior coherent.
The most important lesson from these projects is that flexibility is now a form of care. TAKK’s insistence that homes should make new forms of coexistence possible reframes architecture as ethical choice rather than neutral backdrop. CASA NM3’s trust in production limits and everyday objects reminds designers that consistency often emerges from constraints, not from free-floating creativity. Domestic space will never be entirely frictionless—and it should not be—but giving inhabitants the tools to reshuffle their environments on their own terms is a clear step forward. The future of comfort lies in interiors that can transform without walls, where layout is not a verdict but a conversation.
