The Story Behind the Name
There is a Japanese word our father used to call us when we were small. He would say it the way parents say things they never fully explain — as a term of endearment, as a sound that meant “the blonde ones,” as a private language between a family. He was an architect. He called us and our mother “Burondo” like it was obvious, like there was no other word for us.
We did not think about it much then.
In 2018, I (Isabel) founded the studio alone. I needed a name and thought of that word — old, familial, slightly foreign, entirely ours. Burondo. It felt right in a way that was hard to articulate: it was not a description of the work, not a reference to a method or a place. It was something more personal than that. It was the name of a relationship.
A year later, Beatriz joined. By then, the name had already become something. We chose to keep it — not because of continuity, not for branding reasons, but because it was still true. It still meant “us”.
What does it mean to name a studio after a word your father used to call you?
It means that the work is never entirely separate from the life. That architecture, for us, has always been entangled with something personal — with the way spaces were discussed at home, with the memory of visiting our father’s studio as children, with the understanding that a room is not just a room but a decision about how someone will live inside it.
Our father was an architect too. We did not plan to follow exactly in his footsteps, but some things are absorbed before you understand them. The idea that materials have a logic. That proportion matters more than decoration. That a well-made space asks nothing of its inhabitant — it simply holds them.
Burondo, the studio, carries all of that. And it carries the name of the family it came from.
We are two sisters running an architecture and interior design practice from Madrid, Alicante and London. Our work spans residential projects, hospitality, and retail — always full-service, always with a close attention to the detail that most people never notice. The position of a door handle. The way a threshold changes the feeling of a room. The quality of light at a particular hour in a particular orientation.
We are not interested in trends. We are interested in what lasts.
The name Burondo does not explain any of that, and it does not need to. It is simply ours — Japanese in origin, Spanish in spirit, familial in the most literal sense. If you know the story, it opens something up. If you don’t, it still sounds like something quiet and precise and a little bit rare.
Which, in the end, is what we are trying to make.
