Lorenzo Castillo Merges Two Oviedo Apartments Into His Dream Home

Lorenzo Castillo, the Madrid-born interior designer at the height of his career, has combined two apartments in an early 20th-century French-style building in Oviedo into a single home he calls his finest work. The residence overlooks the Campo de San Francisco park in the Asturian capital, where Castillo lives with his partner of more than 20 years, Alfonso Fernández Reyero, and their dog Tana.

"I always say this, but to paraphrase Karl Lagerfeld: 'the next house will be the best one.' In this case, this home is the one," Castillo told AD Spain, laughing.

The renovation posed the project's greatest challenge: fusing two apartments into one enormous space with few rooms, all of them large, designed for a comfortable flow between them. Castillo made an unconventional choice with the layout. He placed the entire bedroom suite on the building's most elegant side, facing the park, and moved the living room to the back, where he reintroduced a glass-enclosed gallery—"a typically Asturian architectural element" that had originally been part of the apartment.

Color governs the interior. The bedroom side receives little sunlight, so Castillo used darker, soothing shades—pinks, blues, camel, and chocolate brown—and painted the ceiling a dusty pink for contrast. "You walk into the bedroom and your heart rate slows down," he said. On the brighter back side, the palette shifts to butter, cream, ochre, and mustard. Throughout the apartment, he added "splashes of gold, lots of gold, everywhere."

Gold, Castillo insists, is not pretension. "Gold is light and warmth—I'm passionate about it. I could cover an entire room with gold," he said, noting his preference for gold with a patina. New gold, brushed—as on the shower screens in this home—"looks as if it's been there for ages." Silver accents balance the warm gold.

The home's decorative elements are each unique: furniture by Jansen, artworks by Gabriella Crespi and Anthony Redmile, and pieces by major 20th-century designers, arranged in what the designer describes as an almost theatrical layout, with touches of Hollywood Regency.

Castillo refreshes the social areas of his homes regularly. "Deep down, decor must always be linked to our quality of life and our search for happiness. That's why I make those constant changes: because I'm still searching for happiness. And since I haven't found it yet, I'll keep designing!" he said.

He rejects the socialite image. "I'm no Truman Capote. I'm not a socialite, even if that's maybe the image I project... deep down, I'm a homebody, just like every good Cancer." In his large Madrid home he created a duplex within the apartment—"our microcosm, and no one is allowed in there. No one, no one, no one," he said. Tana guards it: the dog bites intruders' ankles only in that space.

The private duplex mixes works by José María Yturralde with pieces Castillo would not hang upstairs, including a portrait of an elderly woman by Álvarez de Sotomayor, an early 20th-century Spanish master portraitist. "It's an artistically superb painting, but it's a little difficult to live with even though I love looking at it all the time," he admitted.

His current obsession is cinematic. Since visiting the Dries Van Noten Foundation in Venice, Castillo has watched Luchino Visconti's 1971 film Death in Venice roughly 20 times in the past month. "Every time I watch it, I discover something new," he said, noting the drapes, Indian fabrics, and Murano necklaces that match pieces from his grandmother's collection.

His maternal grandmother, a subscriber to the American edition of Architectural Digest, which cost a thousand pesetas an issue, shaped his early taste with her Madrid home on Calle Conde de Aranda—turquoise high-gloss kitchen, blue-and-white Portuguese tiles, American wallpaper. "It would be a total hit today!" he said. His mother took him fabric shopping from age 10 and later let him handle the decorating.

Growing up in 1970s Spain, Castillo felt like an outsider studying art history—"everyone thought I was a freak," first at Colegio Estudio, then at the Universidad Complutense—until he concluded that his difficulty fitting in "wasn't my problem but society's."

He opened an antique shop in Madrid's Barrio de las Letras with his brother Santiago, with their father's help. Colleagues could not categorize him: "The other antique dealers would say to me, 'You're not an antiques dealer; you're a decorator!' Then the decorators would come up and tell me, 'You're not a decorator; you're an antiques dealer!'" His approach—mixing classic French pieces with 1960s and '70s furniture—broke with Spain's collector-driven antiques market. "I wasn't inventing anything, all I did was read books," he said, crediting David Hicks as a precedent.

Among Spanish masters, Castillo names Jaime Parladé, who "created an international Spanish style, something we were lacking," and Rafael García, "the great forgotten figure of our interior design scene," a Valencian pioneer who designed film sets in the 1960s and '70s and ran a showroom on Madrid's Plaza de la Independencia. Spain's decorative decline, he argues, stems from a bourgeoisie that emerged only late, leaving the country with a large peasant population, a small nobility, and a court through the 18th and 19th centuries.

Teaching has become Castillo's primary focus, alongside his television role on the Spanish design competition DecoMasters. He will soon publish a book on the fundamentals of interior design. "I always think that the best is yet to come," he said. "Interior design is becoming increasingly accessible and it appeals to a growing number of people from all walks of life, because it depends less on one's financial situation and more about having the curiosity to understand how to create beautiful spaces—spaces that are so important to achieving happiness."

This interview was originally published by AD Spain and translated by John Newton.