Among the hip cafes and tapas bars in Barcelona’s beachside district of Poblenou sits a 50,000 square metre 1970s industrial building. On its rooftop, two small studio apartments are merged into one, creating a unique home atop one of the city’s liveliest districts. While embracing the industrial nature of the existing building, architecture studio, Bajet Girame added a constellation of architectural elements to create an interior landscape that “blurs the conventional boundaries of traditional family rules”.

Following the “archetype of the ‘loft’ as a paradigm,” Bajet Girame note their design was all about the “gregarious, playful and self-poetic spatial appropriation” of the two apartments into one. Arranging the new apartment’s footprint into triads, the resulting spaces are not three rooms, but rather, three zones that “combine a constellation of living and working situations within generous spaces that navigate from indoors to outdoors,” share the architects. With a 60-square-metre terrace spanning the length of the apartments, each of the living areas spills outwards onto Poblenou, embracing the cityscape that lies just beyond.

Embracing solid features such as the existing and highly textural concrete column grids and changes in the original building’s floor levels, Bajet Girame’s additions are curated, light and deliberate. “The 1970s building was enhanced through an approach to tectonics” between the new and existing, explain the architects. The perimeter blockwork walls provide a thermal layer, while smaller wooden volumes, taking the form of joinery and wall cladding and stainless steel structures, were thought of as ‘small buildings’ that were added within this larger building’s interior landscape. “Each layer is expressed as a raw material,” says the Bajet Girame team, noting how “layers can be freely engaged, enjoyed and transformed over the course of time.”

Throughout the apartment, several walls are lined with full-height mirrors. Creating a heightened illusion of layered space, Bajet Girame embrace mirrors as a clever tool towards making the otherwise skinny volumes seem larger than they are. In the bathroom, clever skylights are incorporated to draw in light while paired with soft pink tiles that lean into a domestic softness that is otherwise missing from the home. Two organic-shaped sinks add a natural touch to the bathroom, resembling large stones found outdoors.

Lining many of the interior walls, plywood furniture-like volumes create various types of joinery. From storage to display walls, they embrace CNC digital production to provide flexible usability, allowing their owners to change their configurations to support varying modes such as working from home, entertaining and resting. A family of stainless steel structures are custom-designed and assembled through laser cut fittings and a series of 3-way joints designed by the architects. With many fittings exposed, it is fairly uncommon, particularly in a kitchen setting to see visible drawer tracks or hinges.

However, in this apartment, they contribute seamlessly to the contemporary fabric Bajet Girame has introduced into the otherwise heritage building. Together, the plywood and steel structures form what Bajet Girame describes as “a small constellation of domestic bodies,” within the larger organism of the home.

[Images courtesy of Bajet Girame. Photography by Jose Hevia.]