Tostadero

The project

Tostadero is the comprehensive renovation of a 190 m² home in the El Clot neighbourhood of Barcelona, designed by MADE BCN, the architecture and interior design studio of architects Mariona Altayó and Diana Bonilla. The name comes from the building's history: according to the studio, the project refers to its industrial past as a coffee roastery (tostadero in Spanish).

The house faces a pedestrian street, in a passage that the studio describes as a “peculiar oasis of colony-type buildings from the early twentieth century”, surrounded by free-standing blocks of more than seven storeys. It has two floors: one had been used for the former industrial activity and the lower one had no partitions. The space was in an advanced state of neglect and its layout, non-existent and unsuitable for a home, called for a global intervention.

Rather than dividing the home with vertical partitions, the studio organises it through contrasts between materials, which delimit the spaces conceptually and help to read each intervention and the overlapping of construction systems. According to Matter's original project page, this play of contrasts moves between the industrial and the cosy, and between past and present.

Each room is treated individually and keeps a different trace of the building's past, “preserving floors, remnants of paper and textures of walls or ceramic vaulted ceilings”, in the studio's words. The new materials are raw and pure, and sit alongside the existing hydraulic tile floors, the brick masonry walls and the vaulted or joist-and-ceramic-vault ceilings.

For the studio, the new is a reinterpretation of the existing, without falling into imitation: it emphasises the characteristic elements of the house's construction system and recalls its past as a roastery. In the main space of the home, a small-format green ceramic tile with yellow joints brings colour and freshness. Matter describes it as a Mediterranean-inspired design that takes the whole towards a more domestic and welcoming atmosphere.

According to the studio's plans, the ground floor brings together the dining room and kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom and a garage, and the basement floor the living room, two more bedrooms, two bathrooms and a studio-office. Both levels open onto the patio, where the material and conceptual resources of the interior are repeated: the parts in poor condition were repaired and the circulation was readapted to strengthen the relationship between inside and outside, so that the patio acts as a filter with the rest of the city.