A fully renovated pair of attached houses where the peculiarities of the original massing become the project’s leitmotiv.

The scheme drawn up by Arquitectura G for this dwelling within a city block of the Catalonian capital’s Eixample frees up the two floor levels completely by removing the old partition, and connects them by means of a spiral staircase that rises the double height. The operation also facilitates illumination through a skylight.

The bathroom, kitchen, storage, and MEP services are placed behind white louver doors that, when closed, have a purifying effect on the actual living spaces, which, however, are executed with material generosity, using large plaques of Macael marble that together with the grey carpeting create a ‘soft and clean’ look.

A jewelry store in the Catalonian capital which brings light into the whole space through a large skylight.

In the Raval neighborhood of the heart of Barcelona, the local firm P-M-A-A has transformed a dark old commercial space into a new flagship store for ECH Jewelry. The static, unmovable parts of the program are placed at the four corners in order to obtain an unobstructed selling area – of squared proportions and with a symmetrical section – and give the shop a great deal of flexibility in displaying its ware.

The ground level being nestled in a cave of sorts, making it hard for daylight to reach it, was the perfect cue to design a skylight that would brighten up the entire store. With a circular base and a warped surface, the skylight is the milestone of the project and gives life to each level – downstairs by catching the eye through the light shining onto the ground floor, and upstairs by forcing customers to move around it.

AZAB transforms an agricultural house for a family into a double home which generates a program that seeks the complementarity of uses.

The Bilbao-based firm AZAB – Cristina Acha, Miguel Zaballa, Ane Arce, Iñigo Berasategui – has turned a 1980s farmhouse into two homes for its owners, a couple and their grown-up daughter. Amid orchards and pasture, the project pursued a double take on domestic life, maximizing the potential of the existing building through a new appearance and upgraded features guaranteeing adequate and compatible use of the two dwellings. The ground-floor unit, previously a farming storehouse with a useful area of 110 square meters, unfolds towards the landscape through a transparent enclosure and an open-plan scheme that concentrates the wet spaces (bathrooms and kitchen) along a central spine.

The perimeter trench emphasizes the private nature of the place, creating an environment that protects the residents while leading their gaze toward the horizon. On the other hand, the upstairs dwelling – with its useful area of 100.97 square meters – is configured by a succession of rooms of similar dimensions, resulting in a space that can be used in different ways. It engages with the surroundings through windows with shutters clad in the same material as the facade. The double domestic program pursues a certain complementarity of uses, in such a way that any part thought out for an autonomous purpose can be drawn into a richer mix that addresses all three occupants’ changing needs.

A wine bar and tasting room challenges conventional notions on restoration by combining two different approaches in a single intervention.

The architecture and urban design practice CHYBIK+KRISTOF designed the ‘House of Wine,’ a wine bar and wine tasting room in the city of Znojmo, in the heart of the Moravia region of the Czech Republic. It is set in a 19th century brewery and the technical space that was added to it in the 1970s, and overlooks a 9th-century chapel and a Gothic church, reflecting the town’s history and architectural layers. Two spaces – each with its distinct heritage – are fused, and in the process they are understood and tackled differently. The architects address each part’s particular structural and functional past, giving traditional notions on restoring historical constructions a rethinking. The project tries to preserve the original essence of the place, and is ultimately more a functional than an architectural renovation.

Besides a wine bar, the older building – rectangular in form – is redefined as a showcase of the history of the place, inviting visitors into the rich tradition of Moravian viniculture. In contrast, to create an altogether new interior space, only the outer structure of the old technical hall was maintained, so the ‘House of Wine’ is reborn as a large, empty, adjustable space. A cheerful arrangement of organic volumes on different planes divides the ‘white cube’ into several separate spaces, recreating the scale and atmosphere of the region’s traditional wine cellars through a series of interconnected small spaces. This new configuration redefines the function and initial form of the atrium.

Due to the asymmetrical arrangement of the windows – caused in turn by the division of the interior space – the technical hall opens out to views of Znojmo, blending with it like an anachronistic structure and becoming part of its architectural culture, and urging visitors to participate in the dialogue between the region and its landscape.

The tone of the facade, on the other hand, is the result of combining the colors of the neighboring buildings, which is further reinforcement of the project’s historical and aesthetic belongingness.

The new store designed by Arquitectura G for the fashion and accessories label Acne Studio in Stockholm, Sweden.

A former banking office in the Swedish capital – an anonymous institutional building located in the city center – became world-famous in 1973 because of an armed heist and hostage crisis that triggered in the victims a psychological reaction later called the ‘Stockholm syndrome.’ Successive renovations carried out by various occupants spoiled the building’s original configuration, and this latest intervention has sought to revive the splendor of the solid neoclassical architecture that is so much a hallmark of early 20th-century ‘temples of money.’ Designed by Arquitectura G, the new flagship store of the

multidisciplinary fashion label Acne Studios has brought back the Ekeberg marble tile flooring of before while upgrading the massive Doric columns that once chained together the old banking halls, which have been redone in imitation marble in the rear part of the shop to mark a new area for fitting rooms. The project is rounded off with a grid of metal luminaires fastened to the ceiling designed by Benoit Lalloz and a number of display surfaces made of resin but given a marble-like finish which, created by Max Lamb, have the effect of mirroring the gravitas of the sumptuous backdrop.

The three rooms that make up the store are connected to one another by columns, some of which are from the original building and others new, as those that conceal the bathrooms at the end of the main axis.

A series of terraces that redefines how two houses in Sant Esteve d’en Bas engage with the exterior and each other.

The group Unparelld’arquitectes has renovated a pair of houses in Sant Esteve d’en Bas, a town in Girona province’s comarca of La Garrocha. The project revolves around a courtyard flanked by the two dwellings, called Can Man and Can Central, and the renovation seeks to reverse the deterioration of their habitability conditions. The former is a holiday home for two families, each one occupying a different floor. And it has two bays: one corresponding to the original house and the other to the courtyard, an area which has filled up progressively. In the latter, the space freed up between both houses is in part shaped by three terrace levels, which face southwest at one end and are set back from the facade on the other, forming a void that serves as an entrance.

The system of terrace-patios ensures natural lighting and cross ventilation of the interiors, for Can Man as well, and a folding enclosure makes it a veranda or a gallery, depending on the time of year, creating a new center of gravity for the homes. The higher terrace is shared and presents two separate entrances. The interior of Can Central is organized around three bands: a longitudinal space parallel to the terrace, accompanied by something like an altarpiece with its succession of niches, a perforated wall accommodating furniture and services zones, and behind this, a longitudinal staircase leading to the top floor.

Tato Architects has reconfigured a Japanese house through an interior that strays from traditional forms while respecting history.

Established by Yo Shimada in 1997, Tato Architects has plenty of experience designing houses and interiors, and has carried out projects in different parts of Japan. Place, culture, and history are the concepts upon which it applies criteria of the kind that give importance to specific everyday needs. In this case the firm was commissioned to renovate a small Japanese house for a couple in Hyogo. To make the most of the available space and fit it out for two people, the original structure was maintained, but the traditional multi-room layout was eliminated.

The project used the opportunity to experiment with form, reconfiguring the interior by adding curved wooden walls to seal off the private areas (bathroom and bedroom), always independently of the external structure. Part of the upper space of curved walls was allotted for storage. A kitchen, a living room, and a dining room completed the program, freely arranged around a large terrace and thus getting much natural light.

A daring sculptural gesture from the architect José María Sánchez that enriches the spaces of a vaulted dwelling in Villanueva de la Serena.

The refurbishment of this house in Villanueva de la Serena, a small town in Badajoz, starts out from the acceptance of the contradictions of the original building, which combines modulated and ornamented facades with a series of highly complex interior spaces. Designed by José María Sánchez, the project inverts the existing structural order due to functional requirements, creating a new layout that distinguishes two essential units, the old house and the new. The ground floor, defined as a grid of rooms with arched vaults resting on bearer walls, is transformed by means of a bold structural gesture that multiplies its functionality.

Two T-beams relieve the space they span from intermediate supports, generating a new open-plan living room that opens horizontally onto the interior garden and is covered by a unique combination of brick masonry arches. This division generated by the structural cross and the two barrel vaults is translated into different virtual precincts within a continuous space. The bedrooms are distributed on the first floor and configured as intermediate zones between the rear garden and a circulation space that can serve as place of work and study.

A bold structural gesture frees up the ground floor from intermediate elements, permitting the creation of an open-plan space thanks to two T-beams that distribute the loads to up to four perimetral columns.