A 1900 apartment in Barcelona’s L’Eixample has been reworked into a 102 m² family home organized as a calibrated sequence from shared to private zones. The project consolidates living, dining, and kitchen into a single daylit volume facing the inner courtyard, inserts a central service band with an entry, storage, and bathrooms, and preserves the street-side bedrooms to retain polychrome ceilings. Structural reinforcement enables a free plan, new insulation and concealed services enhance comfort, and a precise material palette balances restored historic fabric with robust contemporary finishes.
CALCIGRONS Apartment Technical Information
- Architects: Nook Architects
- Location: L’Eixample, Barcelona, Spain
- Gross Area: 102 m2 | 1,098 Sq. Ft.
- Completion Year: 2025
- Photographs: © Enric Badrinas
We designed an open space for communal use situated towards the inside of the city block, capitalising on the side of the home with the greatest amount of sunlight. The idea was for this space to house several functions, including the kitchen, dining room, living room and several nooks for working and reading.
– Nook Architects
Typology and Brief: Reworking a 1900 Eixample Apartment
The existing flat exemplified the deep, over-partitioned Eixample typology, where a sequence of small rooms diminishes light and cross-ventilation. After more than a decade of occupation, the family required programmatic clarity, two bathrooms, and significant storage without sacrificing the craft value of the historic fabric. The brief steered the project toward a plan that would align domestic routines with the building’s inherent light gradient, using the inner courtyard side for everyday gathering and the street side for quieter, more enclosed uses.
The intervention reframes 102 m² as three legible zones: a communal front anchored by the courtyard, a central transitional band for services and storage, and a rear domain of private rooms. This re-organization addresses the shortcomings of the original cellular plan while allowing heritage elements to remain visible and intact. Polychrome ceilings, timber beams, and ceramic vaults are treated as fixed constraints that shape the distribution, not as obstacles to be concealed.
Plan as Gradient: From Shared Core to Private Rooms
Living, dining, kitchen, and compact work or reading nooks cohabit a single open volume facing the inner courtyard, where daylight and sky exposure are strongest. The open plan accommodates shifting family routines, from collective meals to dispersed individual tasks, without relying on movable partitions. Furniture placement, light reflectivity, and storage thicknesses define zones rather than walls, which sustains clarity of circulation along the perimeter and maintains views toward the gallery.
The central band absorbs entry, storage, and two bathrooms, acting as a buffer between communal and private realms. A freestanding wardrobe, deliberately short of the ceiling, filters sightlines and creates dressing antechambers to each bedroom while preserving the continuity of the vaults overhead. This compress-and-release sequence gives the bedrooms privacy without sealing them off from the architectural language of the whole, making the historic ceiling surfaces legible beyond their rooms.
The two street-facing bedrooms remain within their original footprint to safeguard decorative ceilings and wood joinery. Accepting lower daylight levels in these rooms privileges conservation and acoustic calm facing the street, while the new plan shifts everyday social life to the brighter interior side. The gradient thus registers as both environmental and programmatic, with comfort calibrated to use rather than imposed uniformly.
Structural and Environmental Upgrades in a Heritage Shell
Removing superfluous partitions required reinforcing the slab with steel profiles, a move that enabled unifying the courtyard openings and creating a continuous living volume. A reinforced concrete compression layer placed atop the slab doubles as the final floor finish, consolidating structure and surface and giving the open zone a durable, easily maintained plane. These decisions express the structural logic of the refurbishment without resorting to false historicism.
Thermal and acoustic insulation is introduced along façades and party walls to mediate the urban context, significantly improving interior comfort in a fabric not initially designed for contemporary performance standards. Building services are concealed to minimize visual intrusion on timber beams, ceramic vaulting, and masonry partitions, maintaining a clear reading of old and new. Ventilation and distribution lines are threaded through thicknesses of storage and service spaces rather than cutting across the restored ceilings.
Restoration focuses on legibility rather than cosmetic uniformity. Timber and ceramic structural elements, masonry textures, and original wood windows and doors are kept visible, calibrated alongside new components so that their age and workmanship remain evident. The project reads as a set of precise insertions that unlock spatial continuity while holding the integrity of the shell.
Material Dialogues: Balancing Continuity and Contrast
The palette juxtaposes stainless and painted steel, mirrored planes, stone, ceramics, exposed concrete, and walnut. Reflective and metallic elements intensify daylight within the open zone, projecting it deep into the plan and multiplying views across the living areas. Robust, tactile surfaces meet the demands of daily use without diluting the character of the original fabric, which supplies grain, color, and ornament in measured doses.
Mirror and steel articulate thresholds and storage, allowing edges to fade or sharpen depending on the angle of view. This produces a perceptual expansion of the main room while retaining clear program boundaries. Walnut and ceramic provide warmth under hand and foot, anchoring moments of pause at the kitchen, reading nooks, and the dressing antechambers that front the bedrooms.
Full-height enclosures are limited to the two bedrooms and bathrooms, allowing the material language to flow uninterrupted across the principal space. The freestanding wardrobe that stops shy of the ceiling exemplifies this approach, offering privacy and capacity while keeping the ceramic vaulting continuous. The result is a legible dialogue where new insertions are crisp and reversible, and the historic envelope remains the primary spatial protagonist.
About Nook Architects
Based in Barcelona and founded in 2011, Nook Architects focuses on interventions that respect and reinterpret existing architecture through thoughtful spatial organization and a refined material palette. Their approach emphasizes articulating everyday routines within legible frameworks, integrating contemporary needs with historical elements to achieve durable, adaptable, and expressive domestic environments.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Francesc Gorgas
- Client: Private family
- Construction company: Calipsa1 S.L.
- Photography: Enric Badrinas
