The project consist of the refurbishment of an apartment located in an old building at the Barcelona Gracia district. The former 90 m2 apartment, was strongly partitioned with up to 6 rooms and showed a dark appearance with almost no connection with the outdoor space.
The project consists of the interior reform of a former gatekeeper residence, located on the roof of a building in the Barcelona district Gracia. Enjoying a privileged location overlooking the neighboring buildings and surrounded by a large terrace, this apartment showed serious deficiencies such as its small size of 38 m2.
This Poble Nou apartment home is a paradigmatic case of the urban and real state transformation that has been sweeping over the city and especially through this neighbourhood in the recent past. The industrial buildings and warehouses at Poble Nou offer “open plan” possibilities, natural light and ventilation in a spot that, as the city grows, is progressively becoming ever so centric.
The previous state of the Sardenya apartment belonged to a way of living incompatible with the requirements of the new owner. These new requirements, even starting from the domestic conventionality, left enough freedom to treat the new apartment in a less corseted way.
The project was born from the idea to link the different spaces of the house by means of a unifying element. This concept was materialized employing a suspended ceiling that communicated both ends of the apartment and overlaid the existing elements and the new intervention.
The first challenge was to transform an old gloomy floor into a bright house. The change of distribution and the new orientation of the common areas that now cross the entire floor, allows light to cross from one end to the other.
In summary, from the client’s predetermined conventional organization, the Villarroel apartment proposes adding layers of complexity to the interior experience of the house, adding ambiguity to the classic labels of each room, as well as to the way they relate to each other, so that all this will eventually translate into greater spatial richness.
The Barcelona Duplex was recently completed by Raul Sanchez Architects. The starting point was two independent dwellings on top of each other on the ground floor and mezzanine of a modest, old apartment building between dividing walls in the heart of the Raval (Barcelona).
