In the 19th-century downtown Sant Feliu de Guíxols, hidden in an extremely tight urban lot, we find a small corner plot of 15.80 x 5.60 metres. The existing two-storey building contains two old-fashioned houses sharing the same single entrance from the street. Our aim is to maximise the potential of this property and improve its habitability.
Given the impossibility of conceding construction volume to the public space due to the strict building regulations, we decide to include this volume as “bubbles” in the private space, in the same way bubbles form holes in the “Emmental” cheese. Thus, the inner spaces of the building become wider and uncrowded. We preserve the original building and release all those dispensable elements. Then we start the rehabilitation of the interior by extending a new third floor. Bound by the building regulations to keep certain space for the courtyard, which will provide daylight to the ground floor, we relocate the main door of the house in the ground floor. The house in the first floor, now turned into a duplex, takes advantage of indoor and outdoor spaces to obtain a more spacious structure in this refurbishment plan. The external bubbles provide both more generously open spaces and the required privacy of one’s own home.
The façade of the building combines different heights in order to keep the originality of the urban lot. The extended floor becomes apparent thanks to a line in black colour between the second and the third floor. Those windows that were once bricked up are now reopened by framing them in black metal plates.
The end result of our work is a refurbished building interacting with the environment in a very particular way and containing two independent houses that are immediately habitable.