Nuria Roca, Spanish TV presenter and wife of writer Juan del Val, has just opened the doors of her new house in Candeleda, a small village in Ávila, about an hour and a half from Madrid. The house isn't new - it had belonged to journalist Javier Capitán. But the build closed that chapter and made it into something completely different. The money funding the renovation comes from the Planeta Prize del Val won in 2024.

"We put the whole prize into this," Roca says. A year of renovation, with five bedrooms, six bathrooms, a large living area split into two zones, a kitchen with Consentino's "Dekton", a bathroom in onyx. Architect and interior designer: Pepe Leal, who's known Roca for a long time.

The aesthetic is what makes this house interesting. "It's not modern, it's not rustic. It's both and neither," says Roca. Pepe Leal mixed the materials without rules: ceramic, stone, brick, wood, steel, aluminium, oxidised details. Old railway sleepers became benches. A mid-20th-century African built-in bed is now the central table in the living room. A granite stone kitchen, but with high-tech Miele appliances - steam oven, vacuum machine, wine fridge.

Architecturally, the idea is what Leal calls "a fusion of the '70s and the future". Oxidised metal surfaces sit next to polished modern ceramic. Greenery enters the house through the large windows. The space is partitioned with ceramic panels - not standard walls, but movable ones. When Roca brings guests, she opens them. When she's alone with the family, she closes them.

For a Balkan context this is a different example from the classic "weekend house in the mountains". Nuria Roca talks about it as a "love place" where she wants to retire and live out her retirement. The microclimate of Candeleda, the closeness to the Vera region, the walking paths through nature. That's the rural Spanish dream, made real with resources the average Balkan resident doesn't have - but the idea behind it doesn't depend on budget. Mixing materials without rules. Pulling nature into the home. Space that opens and closes as needed. Even your grandmother's weekend cottage in Mavrovo inherits it, only she didn't know she was a 21st-century designer.