The apartment, designed by REHAB-me and Gastón Gil, is located in the first floor of a building from 1898 in Poble Sec, Barcelona.

Poble Sec was one of the first expansions of Barcelona city centre during the 19th century. It was first inhabited around 1850 and the district has a long-standing tradition in the world of entertainment and culture.

The existing flat was divided into multiple small rooms connected by a corridor and the available budget was very low.

The architects’ main spatial strategy was to exchange the positions of the kitchen and the bathroom, opening up the space of the new kitchen into the living room.

In order to enjoy greater amplitude, light and new air.

The intervention also connects the existing rooms through new doors, in order to increase the potential bedroom surface areas and enable new uses.

By demolishing the successive existing ceilings, the architects recovered the original height of the space and decided not to incorporate new materials.

Above 3.80m

They accepted the existing ones, maximising the qualities of the accidental textures and singularities, the wooden beams, the hydraulic floor, etc.

They decided to paint the walls in white, placing in the same level the existing plaster and the new textures that appear for the first time.

Finally, the kitchen furniture and the new doors provide light and a touch of colour to the new atmosphere.

With tri-layered yellow wood.

The project was born out of an exercise of making more with less, with the simple objective of improving the living conditions of a flat that originally was in poor conditions.