BARCELONA APARTMENT
BY BACH ARQUITECTES
WITH ENCAUSTIC FLOOR
TILES
Architects Anna and Eugeni Bach
were asked to renovate a pair of
existing apartments on the upper
two floors of a housing block in
Barcelona’s Eixample district to
create a two-storey home for a
young family, which is named Urgell
Apartment.
Luckily, the architects managed
to find more of the tiles when
another flat in the block was being
refurbished. «We asked them what
they were doing with the old tiles
and they wanted to get rid of them,
so we took them to our site,» said
Bach.
While the upper flat had been
built in the 1960s, the one below
it was considerably older and still
contained some of the original
encaustic floor tiles, which were
made by pouring differently
pigmented ceramics into a mould
divided by walls before pressing the
tiles to create a pattern that goes
right through.
With seven different kinds of tiles,
the architects created a variety of
stripes across the entire lower floor,
including a large living and dining
room, a children’s bedroom and a
small bathroom.
«In Barcelona it is quite typical to
find these kind of tiles in old flats
from the end of the nineteenth
century and beginning of the
twentieth,» said Eugeni Bach
«The problem was that there were
not enough tiles for the whole flat
because in some rooms they had
been replaced for newer ones.»
This staircase is contained with a
boxy structure that encompasses
kitchen units and storage closets on
the lower level, as well as laundry
facilities and a desk on
the upper floor.
A new pine staircase ascends to
a master bedroom, bathroom and
study on the level above.
T
he second most important material
in the flat is the pine wood for the
cupboards, the stairs and the flooring
on the upper level,» added Bach.
A decked terrace runs along the side of the
upper floor and features a folding metal
staircase that leads up to a larger terrace on
the top of the roof.
Two voids are punched through the stairwell
to improve views between floors. The first is
a window that looks through to the kitchen,
while the second provides a view onto the
stairs from the study.
It’s become quite fashionable to retain or
reuse this type of traditional floor tile in
Barcelona.