Designed by HARQUITECTES, this single-family house in Barcelona reimagines traditional Mediterranean typologies to create a bioclimatic, inward-looking home in the middle of the city. Bound by dense urban surroundings and limited to three floors above ground, the house responds with a spatial strategy that features a central atrium and cloister anchoring the entire design. The home’s interior revolves around these voids, offering light, ventilation, and vertical orientation. This is an antidote to the darkness and poor air quality often found in deep urban plots.

Excavating light from the centre

With only the historic street façade remaining from the original building, HARQUITECTES approached the new design with a clear intent: turn the centre of the house into its brightest, most open and breathable space. The wide plot allowed for the reintroduction of archetypal Mediterranean forms. The ground-floor atrium and the second-floor cloister create a porous, vertically open space at the core. This central void draws in daylight from above and accelerates cross-ventilation, turning the centre into the home’s climatic engine.

Hierarchy through height and mass

The layout organises the programme into a system of primary and secondary spaces. Each floor features four main rooms that are larger, taller, and orthogonally planned, and smaller, more compressed secondary rooms that infill the gaps. This hierarchy resolves the irregular geometry of the plot and amplifies the spatial experience. The main spaces feel expansive and airy, while the complementary ones offer intimacy and control. It’s an approach reminiscent of carved or excavated architecture, where the structure itself becomes part of the interior topography.

Structure as climate control

The house’s thick structural walls are cast in place using a ‘poor’ concrete mix that is low in cement, rich in sand and gravel, and compacted in a technique akin to rammed earth. These massive, mineral walls provide thermal inertia and acoustic buffering, while remaining breathable enough to help regulate interior humidity. Within them, the smallest and most sensitive programmes like bathrooms or storage, are embedded, taking advantage of their protected microclimate.

The atrium and cloister as collective space

The ground-floor atrium is the home’s symbolic and functional centre: four central pillars define an open virtual space for the living room, flooded with natural light and open to sky through a zenithal aperture. Above it, the cloister continues the vertical sequence, acting as an elevated extension of the surrounding rooms. Unlike the atrium, which centres activity, the cloister frames it. Circulation, interaction, and repose all unfold around its perimeter, reinforcing a collective domestic life.