Interior Design — Villa Esmeralda

The owners — a Scandinavian couple in their late forties relocating to Marbella with two teenage children — bought the villa fully renovated by another contractor and engaged Magnum Reformas exclusively for the interior design and fit-out. Their brief was unusually clear: they wanted a home that felt Spanish but read calm and editorial, with no glossy white surfaces, no chrome, no anything that would look dated by 2030. They love texture above all — bouclé, linen, brushed wool, hand-trowelled plaster — and asked us to layer materials in a way that reveals more on the second look than the first. We built the entire concept around three reference moods: a 1960s Andalusian finca, AD Spain editorials and Vincent Van Duysen's residential interiors. The deliverable was a full design pack plus on-site placement of every piece down to the cushions and books on the console.

Technical Specifications

Before any plan was drawn, our interior-design team built a physical moodboard at our Marbella studio — flat-lay of every material that would appear in the villa. Calacatta marble offcut, smoked European oak veneer, brushed antique-brass hardware sample, three bouclé fabric swatches, two linen weaves, hand-trowelled limewash plaster on a sample board, terracotta floor tile fragment and a piece of natural jute. The clients spent half a day in the studio touching every sample under daylight and lamplight before signing off. This physical material library was photographed and bound into the design pack, so every contractor, upholsterer and stone supplier worked from the same reference. Nothing was specified by name alone — every material in the project traced back to a piece of matter we could hand-deliver.

Technical Specifications

We delivered the design pack as a full set of 1:50 plans: one per floor with every piece of furniture drawn to scale, plus separate lighting and joinery plans at 1:25. Every sofa, console, rug, dining chair and bedside table was placed on the plan before the first delivery arrived — so when 47 individual items came in over four weeks, every truck unloaded into its final position with no second-guessing on site. The plans also fixed the electrical layout for floor sockets, table-lamp circuits and dimmer scenes before the M&E contractor's snagging team came back for finals — this avoided the classic problem of beautiful styling sabotaged by a cable running across the wrong floor.

Technical Specifications

Three states tell the story of an interior commission. Before: the house when we received it from the previous owners — a 1990s villa with terracotta floor tiles, peachy walls, dark mahogany trim and a brass-and-glass chandelier from another era. During: the same room six months later, freshly renovated by the building contractor — clean travertine floor, smooth limewash walls, ready joinery openings — but completely empty, the architectural canvas before the interior design touches it. After: the same room, fully dressed by Magnum Reformas — the bouclé sofa, the smoked-oak coffee table, the layered jute rug, the warm lamps, the books, the olive branch in the ceramic vase. The before-and-after slider on this page anchors on this one room so visitors can see exactly what interior design adds on top of construction.

Technical Specifications

The master bedroom suite required a bespoke walk-in dressing room — a 12 m² narrow space with a single high window. We designed it as a smoked-European-oak gallery with floor-to-ceiling cabinets on three walls: hanging space, drawer banks for folded knitwear, glass-fronted display for shoes and bags, and a central island with a Calacatta-topped jewellery drawer. The fourth wall holds a full-length mirror flanked by brushed-brass picture lights for daylight-quality dressing. In the secondary bedrooms, a more compact solution: 3-bay built-in wardrobes, again in smoked oak, with fluted-glass central panels and integrated LED strips in the shadow gap above each door so the wardrobe glows softly when opened. Every wardrobe was hand-built in our Mijas joinery workshop and installed without a single visible screw on the front face.

Technical Specifications

We treated the walls as a third architectural surface — neither plain plaster nor decoration, but joinery and pattern used with restraint. The principal living room wall behind the sofa is finished in fluted European oak paneling running floor to ceiling — vertical 30 mm staves with 6 mm shadow gaps between, so the surface reads as gentle ribs that catch evening lamplight. The dining room and master bedroom each have a single accent wall in hand-blocked botanical wallpaper — soft sage and ochre on a warm cream ground, hung by a specialist paperhanger from Málaga who books out months in advance. The remaining walls throughout the villa stay calm: hand-trowelled limewash plaster in warm cream that catches subtle tonal variation as the day moves.

Technical Specifications

An interior is judged at the level of detail most people only register subconsciously: how a bed is made, how a dining table is set. The master bed wears layered washed linen in chalk and oat — fitted sheet, flat sheet, two pillows in cream linen, two larger pillows in cream cashmere, a pure-wool throw across the foot, and three boucle scatter cushions in graduated tones. The bedside tables carry an alabaster-and-brass lamp, a single ceramic carafe with a glass on top, and a hand-bound book turned face up. The dining table is set for six even when no one is eating: cream linen runner, hand-thrown stoneware plates with a soft sage glaze, brass cutlery, hand-blown drinking glasses, six pillar candles in a varied cluster down the centre and a flat ceramic centerpiece holding fresh olive branches. No piece is decorative for its own sake — every object is chosen to be used.

Technical Specifications

The final layer is lighting and the small objects. Lighting is layered on three planes throughout the villa: ceiling downlights on dimmer scenes for general illumination (used at 30% most of the time), alabaster-and-brass table lamps at every seating position for evening warmth, and brass picture lights above artwork and the walk-in mirror for accent. Decor follows the same restraint as everything else: a console-top still life of one Calacatta-edged tray, two hand-thrown ceramic vessels, three hand-bound books and a hammered-brass hurricane candle. The scatter of small objects across the project — bowls, candle holders, vases, books, framed botanicals — totals about 90 individual pieces, every one chosen by our interior team and listed on a master inventory so the housekeeper can return any object to its position after cleaning. Textures are deliberately layered everywhere: bouclé on linen on cashmere on wool, oak on stone, brass on plaster — the second-look reveal that the client originally asked for.

Technical Specifications

An interior-design commission with Magnum Reformas starts with a free 90-minute consultation at your property or at our Marbella showroom, where our lead interior designer establishes the brief and the constraints. Within 10 working days you receive a concept pack: 3 mood directions, indicative palette and a fixed-fee quote covering the full design + procurement + on-site styling. Once approved, every material decision is made together at the showroom with physical samples in hand. We deliver plans, joinery drawings, lighting schedules, FF&E spec sheets and an installation calendar. On handover day, every cushion is plumped, every book is placed, every plant is watered — you walk into a finished home, not a furniture warehouse.

Technical Specifications