In Madrid’s Chamberí district, Isern Serra’s FUBA Bakery merges ancestral forms with futuristic precision, turning a simple bakehouse into an immersive meditation on time and material.
Conceived by chef Fabián Leon, FUBA—short for Future Bakery—embodies the balance between nourishment and design, between the instinctive and the futuristic. Serra’s spatial translation of Leon’s ethos results in a sensorial environment where the act of eating becomes inseparable from the architectural experience.
The space unfolds like a softly illuminated grotto, its walls sculpted and rounded as though eroded by time. A wash of lime covers every surface, muting light into a pale shimmer that feels almost geological. Serra’s treatment of texture—organic, irregular, imperfect—anchors the project firmly in the realm of the “origin,” a nod to Leon’s wish to recall the primitive act of baking. Yet these cave-like gestures are counterbalanced by moments of precision: cool stainless steel furnishings punctuate the roughness like markers of a technological present.
At the center, a sweeping stainless steel table becomes both altar and workstation, resting delicately on one side atop a block of natural rock sourced from a nearby quarry. This striking juxtaposition—industrial polish meeting geological mass—captures the essence of FUBA’s concept: a conversation between the ancestral and the modern. Elsewhere, slender steel shelves nestle into carved wall niches, displaying loaves as sculptural objects rather than mere food.
Natural light is carefully simulated through a faux lightwell, creating the illusion that the space opens to the sky. The visual rhythm of curvature and shadow guides visitors through the bakery, toward glazed openings that reveal the kitchen beyond. This transparency—literally and metaphorically—underscores Leon’s philosophy of process and purity. Every loaf, every curve, seems to emerge from the same dialogue between nature, craft, and innovation.
In FUBA, Serra and Leon achieve an interior that transcends function. It feels both prehistoric and futuristic, a kind of time capsule where bread-making becomes ritual and design becomes memory. The result is a bakery that redefines the relationship between body, space, and sustenance.
