AT10 APARTMENT II

The large urban villa dating from 1904, in which we were commissioned to thoroughly remodel a first floor apartment, is located on a prominent avenue at the foot of Barcelona’s Collserola hills.  By the 1950’s the villa had been transformed by its owner into six individual residential units some of which underwent subsequent renovations; the unit we were asked to remodel had been used as an architecture studio for the past twenty years.

Prior to our remodel scheme the apartment layout consisted of a very long and narrow corridor

from which two large amorphous spaces hung. An antiquated kitchen was located at the rear end of the apartment far from the main living/dining rooms.  Our scheme has resulted in a three-bedroom apartment with a flexible layout; over time, as needed, these rooms can be repurposed as home offices, playrooms, etc.

The principal objective of the scheme was to reduce the length of the corridor while providing it with natural light (through glazed transoms and doors), and to relocate the kitchen, transforming it into the central element of the new layout. The new position of the kitchen at the “front” (street orientation) of the apartment allows for two parallel circulation routes, one along the shortened existing corridor and one through the newly configured interconnected rooms.

The device employed to combine kitchen and hall into essentially one room, a space of interchange, is a bespoke cupboard that stands short of the ceiling off of which we have created a stool-high table which is an extension of the worktop surface.

The primary palette of materials chosen for the project was limited to oak parquet flooring throughout with the exception of marble floors in the kitchen, marble kitchen countertops, varnished plywood, and semi-lacquered built-in cupboards and panelling. 

 

Sant Gervasi. Barcelona, 2015

Photographer, Lorenzo Kárász