Hiha Studio breaks up linear residence with curved hall

A curved hall with full-height doorways slices by means of Hiha Studio’s renovation of this floor ground dwelling close to Barcelona.

Native architects Hiha Studio renovated the house, which beforehand had no out of doors house and suffered from an absence of sunshine and air flow, for the home’s house owners.

Inbuilt 1925 and refurbished right into a two-bedroom dwelling within the 1960s, the lengthy and slender 80-square-metre dwelling is sandwiched between two different buildings on a residential avenue within the municipality of Montcada i Reixac, simply to the north of Barcelona.

The neighbourhood is made up of comparable single-storey homes constructed within the first quarter of the 20th century. Sometimes, the bottom ground homes are constructed on rectangular plots measuring 4 to 5 metres in width and 10 to 15 metres in size with a patio in the back of the home.

Consistent with the native housing typology, the renovated residence’s facade is outlined by three slender rectangular apertures – two home windows and a door. The straightforward home windows are partly lined by a grid of ornamental terracotta bricks.

The hole bricks, that are typical of the world and could be seen on the neighbouring buildings, present a level of privateness and shade throughout the residence. The grid sample is echoed throughout the residence’s darkish gray door.

Inside, a protracted curved hall guides company from the doorway by means of to an open-plan kitchen and dwelling space that appears out onto a rear patio.

The residence’s different rooms are distributed alongside the curved hall with a bed room on the entrance of the residence adopted by an workplace and a toilet within the centre. A small patio within the centre of the residence gives pure mild into the lavatory and workplace.

The rooms all have a barely decrease ceiling than the hall, a design characteristic that’s supposed to spotlight the curve and the transition from the open hall to those extra non-public and intimate areas. These rooms are accessed by means of tall doorways that skim the lowered ceiling.

Hiha Studio defined that when opened, the doorways’ giant, frameless design makes the house seem bigger and extra seamless, as if it have been “a steady house”.

The place the curved wall stops and the hall opens out into the dwelling space, the curve of the wall is sustained as a lowered ceiling that cuts diagonally throughout the room.

The curved wall alongside the hall and all the partitions under the lowered curved ceiling within the dwelling space are painted mild gray, which the architects stated was accomplished in an try “to delay the continuity and the burden of the curve”.

Household dwelling by Hiha Studio options double-height rooms and rammed earth partitions

The structure studio stated that this curved kind is designed to interrupt up the “linear and monotonous” structure which is typical of any such dwelling. They stated it additionally creates “an optimum mild state of affairs”, permitting daylight to filter alongside the hall from the patio.

“Normally all of the tasks [in this housing typology] resolve this situation with a protracted hall and we didn’t need it, we wished to keep away from the linear visuals,” stated Bernat Ardèvol, who runs the Hiha Studio alongside architects Jona Oliva and Genís Plassa.

“We thought within the motion and sensation that everybody have when will get into Richard Serra work’s. And in addition this by no means ending inside corridors of the Colosseum.”

Tthe architects selected to make use of terracotta-coloured porcelain tiles to create a dialogue between the within and out of doors of the constructing.

These ceramic components are designed to take a seat in distinction to the residence’s white partitions and impartial carpentry and furnishings. Within the kitchen, a Corinto stone is used as a backsplash.

The architects put in a sequence of easy tubular LED wall lights referred to as Linestra lights that have been generally used within the 1970s and 1980s in Catalonia.

“We normally use the identical mild in our tasks,” Ardèvol defined. “We prefer it as a result of it’s elegant and goes unnoticed. We normally use it as a place mild, simply to have the minimal mild to recognise the house/room. We do not wish to impose the lighting, we favor that the shopper can resolve what mild and lamps they needs as a secondary lighting.”

Palma Hideaway in Mallorca is obscured from the road by a tiny tiled backyard

Earlier this yr, the Barcelona-based studio eliminated flooring and inserted lofty voids to create a light-filled household dwelling in a northeastern Spanish village.

Images is by Pol Viladoms.