Mijas Apartment Before and After: A Light-First Reno

The flat had good bones under bad decades. Dark terracotta tile, heavy curtains over small windows, and partition walls that boxed in what little light got through. The owners didn't want to gut it. They wanted to find the apartment already there, under the 1970s additions. Most of the work turned out to be subtraction. If you've stood in an old pueblo blanco flat wondering where to start, here's the order things happened in.

Start with the light, not the floor

The highest-impact change cost the least: taking down the window treatments. Off came the heavy curtains, bare were left the deep reveals, and the flat immediately read as twice its size. Mijas apartments have thick walls and small openings. Those are constraints you work with, not problems to fix — the deep reveals do real work once you stop hiding them.

Walls came next. White is the obvious move, but flat brilliant white turns blue and clinical in strong Andalusian light. A warm off-white — a chalky base with a touch of yellow — holds the light without throwing it back as glare. Test two or three tones on the actual wall, and look at them at midday and again at six. Paint shifts more by the hour than most people expect.

Partition walls are the bigger decision. One came out here, to connect the entry to the living space; the rest stayed. You don't need an open plan. You need the light to reach more than one room.

Floors: keep, soften, or replace

The original terracotta divides opinion, and the honest answer is that it depends on condition. If the tile is sound and only dark, it's usually worth keeping. Sealing and a lighter grout can shift it a long way, and replacement is the most expensive, most disruptive item on any list. Here the tile stayed.

What changed the floor was rugs, not demolition. Hand-knotted wool over old tile cuts the visual weight and warms the room underfoot. A neutral Beni Ourain or a flat Turkish kilim sits well against terracotta without fighting it; our hand-knotted rug collection is built around exactly this kind of pairing. Buy the rug to the room, not the room to the rug. Measure first, and size up rather than down.

Furnishing followed one rule: fewer pieces, chosen properly. The previous owner's furniture was cleared and replaced with less of it. Plain walls do more when there's room to read them, so the styling stayed restrained — a few handcrafted ceramic and serving pieces on open shelves, linen cushions and bedding in the bedroom, and natural-fibre baskets doing the storage that clutter used to. Olive-wood and carved accents add texture that suits the building's age. The aim isn't decoration; it's a small number of well-made objects with somewhere to breathe.

The terrace got the lightest touch: a pair of pierced-metal lanterns and sun-tolerant seating, nothing more.

If you're starting your own

A practical order of operations, drawn from how this one went:

1. Strip back before you add. Curtains, partition walls, and inherited furniture first. You can't judge a room until you've seen it empty and lit.
2. Spend on the floor decision and the paint. These are the expensive things to redo. Test paint on the wall, not on a chart.
3. Buy rugs and storage early. They solve the two biggest problems — cold floors and clutter — faster than anything structural.
4. Add objects last, and fewer than you think. A handful of considered pieces against plain walls beats a full shelf.

This is the part of our work Prudence values most: sourcing pieces that earn their place, and helping people put them together without the markups the bigger interiors firms charge. None of it needed a demolition budget. It needed patience, and a willingness to take things away before adding anything back. Start with one room, one rug, one decision to let the light in.

If your own pueblo blanco flat is somewhere on your list, and you're ever along the coast, our little shop in Fuengirola is an easy place to start — come and see how a few well-made pieces sit on a plain, light-filled wall before you commit. Our wall decor collection is the kind of thing that's hard to judge from a screen and easy to fall for in person. Show this on your phone when you stop by and we'll take 10% off whatever comes home with you, with the code NESTO-3894 — a small thank-you for making the trip. Make yourself at home.