Colour Blocked in Barcelona
Klinker Apartment is set inside an art-nouveau building in Barcelona’s El Born neighbourhood and serves as a holiday home for a family of four hailing from Coronado, California. The owner, an interior designer, had initially planned to renovate the 75 square-metre apartment herself. Sadly, several months into the construction works, a fire destroyed a majority of the new elements as well as a number of historic details. So she hired locally-based Colombo and Serboli Architecture to carry out a budget-friendly renovation that focused on simple, aesthetic alterations – due to the the losses incurred by the fire the owners could no longer afford to make major changes to the apartment’s layout.
After completely stripping back and repairing surfaces that had been blackened by the fire, the studio used colour-blocking to delineate different living spaces. Terracotta-orange paint has been applied across the dropped ceiling, splashback, cabinetry and central breakfast island in the kitchen.
The same shade of micro cement has then been applied to a strip of flooring that runs directly underneath, contrasting against surrounding patterned tiles that were saved from the previous fit-out. Orange also covers every surface in the study, which has been created within a narrow recess in the wall.
A bespoke L-shaped desk has been slotted into the corner, directly underneath a new porthole window that lets natural light into the space.
Deep-purple paint was selected to coat the ceiling of the living area, where some ornate plasterwork has also been restored. The lower half of the room’s walls are painted sandy-beige, forming what the practice describes as an “artificial horizon”.
It visually widens spaces, in an otherwise vertically proportioned property. A sage-green border has been created around the master bedroom which envelops the headboard. A pale grey sofa with a mustard-yellow frame, plum-coloured stool seats and leafy potted plants have also been dotted throughout the home to subtly introduce more colour.