Case study — Residential
Gràcia Atelier
Gràcia, Barcelona · 2020
The new face to the passage — raw timber and corten from the workshop's own vocabulary.
- Location
- Gràcia, Barcelona
- Year
- 2020
- Type
- Residential
- Status
- Completed
- Area
- 180 m²
- Role
- Architect and site supervisor
- Client
- Private
- Photography
- Placeholder imagery
The site was a locksmith's workshop at the end of a Gràcia passage: one long room, a saw-tooth roof, and ninety years of grease on the brick. The clients — a photographer and a ceramicist — wanted to live and work in it without erasing what it had been.
The intervention is a single new element: a timber gallery inserted along the north wall, holding the bedrooms and a studio mezzanine. It never touches the old roof. Below it, the workshop floor remains one continuous space — kitchen, press, kiln, and dinner table sharing the same concrete slab.
The best room in the house was already there. Our job was to move in carefully.
To the passage, the house presents a new face of raw timber and corten — materials from the workshop's own vocabulary — with a gate that slides open on market days to let the studio become a shopfront.
The project was completed on a modest budget by a two-person site crew, and taught the studio more about building economy than any project before or since.
