Tyche Apartment
Barcelona, Spain
2015
CATEGORY
RESIDENTIAL / COMPLETE RENOVATION
TEAM
COLOMBO AND SERBOLI ARCHITECTURE + MARGHERITA SERBOLI AQUITECTURA
SURFACE
108m2
STATUS
COMPLETED
PHOTOGRAPHY
The property occupies an art nouveau building of the Eixample district of Barcelona.
The project is the result of a collaboration between CaSA and Architect Margherita Serboli.
Its longitudinal distribution, forced by the transversal bearing walls, resulted in many densely separated small spaces, spared along a long corridor that isolated the two ends of the apartment.
The client’s brief has used a guideline: their wish was to have three double bedrooms and a home that would highlight and underline early 1900 detailing of the building, through a design with a contemporary language.
The natural light – as usual a fundamental project theme – brought the architects to the complete renovation of the existing arrangement of spaces.
The three bearing walls that previously compressed the fractured layout have been transformed into transversal axes around which the space is organised into different areas.
The first of these axes correspond to the hall, and it organizes the continuous space between the wide living space and the open kitchen that now occupies the area that was previously a bedroom. The widest day area has been created by opening part of the old corridor to the kitchen-living area, and by doing so allowing the light to flood in, through the dense pattern of treetops.
The block that embodies the two minor bedrooms grows around the second axe. This light pink coloured volume separates the day area from the last one: an open-space master bedroom, previously occupied by a kitchen and a studio. This solution allows making the most of the light coming from the great original window frame that occupies almost all the wall facing the inner courtyard.
The client’s will to retrieve the art nouveau essence has led the project to the restoration of original features while adding new components that could sustain the same language without betraying his own contemporaneity. For this purpose, some of the original features have been rescued, like the original windows woodwork or the Catalan vaults.
For the same reason, it was decided to intervene reinterpreting one of the most characteristic elements of art nouveau apartments in Barcelona: the floors. The architects have expressly designed a hydraulic tile, using a current format as the hexagonal and contemporary colours, in order to reinvent this typical element of modernist architecture.
Off-white, solid, continuous floors form the edge to an irregular carpet of colourful geometrical shapes that lead from the entrance to the hall, unifying environments, and invade the rest of the flat.
The choice of this floor responded to clients’ requests for high resistance, low maintenance material.
The palette of materials and colours creates a dialogue that’s always different, punctuated by the two volumes that define the project, one in pink paint, the other clad in wood.
A Mediterranean-inspired atmosphere dominates the entire flat with a combination of colours partly suggested by original features and dominated by white and pastel tones.
At the end of the corridor, a pine-clad block disguises the general bathroom; this same timber volume becomes the suite’s walk-in wardrobe - once passed the sliding door that’s the suite threshold - and protrudes into the bedroom turning into wooden nightstands, that double as steps to access the suite bathroom.
As for the furniture project, customers have asked for pieces that would be consistent with the fresh colour palette, to reaffirm the holiday vocation of the property.
White metal elements and pastel colours were picked, along with a few grey objects, to emphasize even more colours and give life to the environment.
Large paintings by Piero Serboli dominate the living space and the suite, offering Mediterranean and colourful imagery.
“We got much more then we expected, we enjoy our new home very much, and warmly recommend CaSA to anyone looking for a fresh-minded, easy to work with architect.”
— Enza Manzú
