Casa Kavi sits on Calle Alburquerque in Chamberí, in the corner of the city Madrid calls Little Buenos Aires, inside what was for years an abandoned neighbourhood bazaar. Kathi Rüd rebuilt those 236 square metres into what she calls a teaching home, and the word home is doing real work: three rooms, each with a name and a purpose, built around the idea that you come here to return to yourself.
Who is behind it
Kathi is a yoga therapist and the kind of teacher who comes to yoga from life, not from the shop window: years of elite sport, years of boardrooms, and the growing certainty that neither was the place. The long version of that search is in our interview with Kathi Rüd, told when Casa Kavi was still a project.
It made me feel something I had never experienced before: an absolute connection with the present, a sense of fullness and peace that stayed with me.
What is practised there
The three rooms say it better than any timetable: Sala Asana for the physical practice, Sala Yuj, from the root that gives yoga its name, and Sala Moksha for letting go. Across them runs a week where yoga is one door among several: yin, nidra, rocket and hatha share the roof with pilates, breathwork, sound baths and voice work. It is a space built for the whole practice, not just the postures, and the house line says the rest: the answers you are looking for are inside.
Why it is a special stop
Because of how it understands the practice: not as a method you are handed but as tools for finding your own answers, which is the house philosophy almost word for word. The building agrees: an entrance made for staying a while after class, three rooms that slow you down on purpose, a corridor drawn for the walk inward. And the community sounds like the name promises: the people who practise there talk about support and belonging as much as about classes. Casa Kavi is one of the studios in our yogi's travel guide to Madrid because a traveller with a week in the city can move, breathe and sing under the same roof, two streets from the best vermouth counters in Chamberí.
If you go
Schedules, the trial class and the rooms themselves are at casakavi.com. Go for the yoga, stay until the building's story catches you: the neighbourhood still remembers the bazaar.
