Our story in Valencia

Founding vision

Spugncerve Studio began when Elena Cervera and Marc Spugnoli left a large Madrid practice to open a smaller atelier focused on craft-led residential work. They chose Valencia for its maker community, affordable workshop space, and the quality of light that floods the Turia basin each afternoon.

The studio name blends their surnames with a nod to cerveza artesanal culture — not because we design bars, but because we admire the patience Valencia's brewers apply to fermentation. Good interiors, we argue, require the same unhurried attention.

The team today

Eight people share our Colón street workspace: four senior designers, two visualisers, a materials researcher, and a studio manager who coordinates site visits across the Comunitat Valenciana. Everyone speaks English, Spanish, and at least one additional language.

We collaborate with a fixed roster of local artisans — plasterers from Alginet, metalworkers in Paterna, and textile studios in Gandía — rather than relying on anonymous catalogue suppliers. This network took a decade to build and remains central to our identity.

Education and recognition

Our work has appeared in Interiores España and on the shortlist for the Valencia Design Week residential category in 2022 and 2024. Elena lectures occasionally at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Valencia on material specification for humid climates.

We do not pursue awards aggressively. Most of our new clients arrive through referrals from past homeowners who hosted dinner parties in rooms we shaped together.

Studio culture

Monday mornings begin with a material review: someone brings a sample — a new terracotta glaze, a recycled cork panel — and we discuss where it might belong. We keep a physical sample library of over four hundred swatches, from Valencian tile to Belgian linen.

Remote work is limited to documentation days. Design decisions happen around a central table where sketches, scale models, and coffee cups accumulate until a direction feels unmistakably right.

Commitment to place

We source within a 300-kilometre radius whenever performance requirements allow, reducing transport emissions and supporting regional economies. Our last annual report showed that seventy-one percent of specified materials originated in Spain.

Valencia is not a backdrop for our portfolio photography — it is the reason our palettes, proportions, and ventilation strategies look the way they do. We design for this city and its surroundings, nowhere else.