Villa V

In Poblenou, a semi-detached house had been put together over the years an almost self-constructed manner. Its footprint is a single bay, 4.7 metres wide between party walls and 18 metres deep, so daylight could enter only at the two short ends of the plan. Above the original ground floor, three further volumes had been added one after another in low-quality systems and materials, and the result was a sequence of dark, fragmented rooms with few spatial qualities to speak of. Aramé Studio's transformation works from that condition rather than clearing it away.

The decisive move is a subtraction. Working directly with the existing structure, the project removes the central volume of the upper floor and opens a large double-height void in its place. A large skylight above it lets light reach the whole interior, where before it stopped at either end — a single gesture that reverses the conditions the house was built with. The void is both where the project begins and where it is most intense: it holds the main staircase, organised around the skylight, and gives the rest of the dwelling its spatial structure.

Below, the ground floor is treated as one continuous living space, closely tied to the rear patio. The centre of the plan is kept free, while the kitchen, bathrooms, storage and fixed furniture are pushed to the perimeter, so the living areas run into one another without division. In the middle of this open floor stands an island-table of concrete cast in situ — fixed, immovable, and intended as the domestic core of the house. The studio treats it as infrastructure for collective life rather than as furniture: the place for gathering, working, shared meals and everyday celebrations, around which domestic life unfolds.

The void also introduces a scale rarely found in domestic interiors. Aramé Studio relates it to the historical palace and the bourgeois house, where the staircase held a central and representative position, and the reference carries into ordinary use: going up or down the stairs becomes a spatial event with an almost theatrical quality rather than a purely functional passage.

That monumentality is deliberately held in check by the materials. The walls lit by the skylight expose the successive layers and materials from which the house was built over time, leaving the marks, scars and imperfections of the existing structure in view. The staircase draws on a vernacular and industrial imaginary and is assembled with traditional timber construction techniques, while the island-table stands as a monolithic piece of raw concrete — heavy, primitive, closer to infrastructure than to an object.

The house keeps these terms in tension without resolving them — monumentality and austerity, bourgeois spatiality and vernacular construction, domesticity and theatre — and its ambiguity is precisely what it proposes.