Sancal’s COLAB Receives a Special Mention at the 2025 FRAME Awards.
The project COLAB, Sancal’s new showroom in Madrid, has received a Special Mention in the Editors’ Pick category at the 2025 FRAME Awards. This recognition, granted by the editorial team of Frame Magazine, highlights projects that best embody the publication’s core values: innovation, sustainability, and critical thinking within the realm of contemporary design. Read the article here.
COLAB is a project led by designer and researcher Lucas Muñoz Muñoz and curated by Esther and Elena Castaño-López. Together, both teams embarked on a renovation project with a clear objective: to rethink uses and extend the life of existing resources. This premise required a process of material archaeology, making it impossible to work from a predefined plan. As a result, the fourth floor of the O’Donnell building became a laboratory and workshop for experimentation throughout the entire refurbishment.
According to Frame’s editorial team, COLAB takes the concept of radical on-site material reuse to the extreme, following a single rule: anything that cannot be recycled must be repurposed. Structural elements such as raised floors and suspended ceilings were transformed into textural walls; old fluorescent bulbs were turned into LED lamps. New structural components and everyday objects born from discarded materials. Each intervention demonstrates that waste can be creatively reimagined when granted a second life, achieving a material yet poetic aesthetic.
Located at 34 O’Donnell Street in Madrid (Spain), COLAB is not only Sancal’s new space in the capital but also a material manifesto that emphasizes the need to rethink construction and consumption processes from a more ethical and sustainable perspective. The project proves that innovation doesn’t always stem from novelty, but from respect for what already exists and the ability to reinterpret the familiar.
A model of collaboration between design, art, architecture, and traditional craftsmanship, COLAB, part COmmune, part LABoratory, is a place where creativity is understood as a form of responsible experimentation.
For Lucas Muñoz, this recognition represents an acknowledgment of collective work and a methodology grounded in honesty, with materials, with context, and with the people who transform them.
At Sancal, we proudly celebrate this international recognition, as it reinforces our commitment to a design approach that combines emotion, functionality, and environmental awareness.
