Wish Fulfillment

Decades after first falling in love with a neighborhood in her native Madrid, designer López-Quesada makes one of its historic houses her own Isabel

- By Paola Singer 

Madrid's landmarked colonias date back to the 1920s and '30s, when clusters of modest patio homes were built on what were then the outskirts of the city to provide affordable housing for working and middle-class families. In the decades that followed, as the urban boundaries billowed out, many of these leafy residential pockets remained untouched, becoming some of the most coveted addresses in the Spanish capital. Interior designer Isabel López-Quesada, a lifelong Madrileña, set her sights on a particularly charming colonia north of El Retiro park, Cruz del Rayo, when she was much too young to own real estate. "I had just started dating my husband and he took me to a party in Cruz del Rayo," remembers López-Quesada, who was only 19 at the time but was already a believer in the power of intention (a subject she talks about unreservedly, jokingly calling it brujeria, or witchcraft). "I said to him, 'Álvaro, I'm going to live here someday!"