Antònia and Roger House is a minimalist residence located in Barcelona, Spain, designed by MH.AP Studio. The project began under an unusual constraint: construction was already underway when MH.AP Studio came aboard, inheriting a defined structural framework from a previous architect. Rather than a limitation, this condition shaped the project’s essential character – the studio was forced into a mode of adaptive design, reading what existed and layering meaning onto a fixed skeleton. The result is a 113-square-meter house in Poblenou that navigates a narrow plot across three levels, achieving genuine spatial coherence from circumstances that might have produced compromise.

Material continuity is the organizing logic of the ground floor. Rectangular beige terracotta tiles extend from the facade across both interior and exterior floors, dissolving the boundary between street and patio and establishing a thermal, tactile register that reads as distinctly Mediterranean. The tile choice carries the weight of regional vernacular – terracotta’s use across Catalan domestic architecture spans centuries, and the studio deploys it here not as pastiche but as a grounding device, anchoring the house in place and climate while keeping the palette restrained. The ground floor kitchen is designed as a transitional, flexible zone rather than a room with fixed programmatic edges, appropriate for a family with two young children and the kind of domestic life that resists rigid separation of activities.

The staircase is where the project finds its most compositionally ambitious moment. On the ground floor it reads as a substantial built volume, incorporating bathroom and storage within its mass. As it rises through the section, it dematerializes – the metal structure becomes perforated, the balustrade opens up, and light filtered from a skylight above travels downward through the voids. The choice to paint this metal work in a saturated cobalt blue gives the element a presence that registers differently at each level. Against the warmth of the terracotta and timber flooring introduced on the upper floors, the blue reads as a deliberate interruption – a contemporary signal embedded within a house that otherwise speaks the quieter language of Mediterranean domesticity. The exposed silver heating pipes throughout carry a similar sensibility, refusing concealment in favor of an honest material presence that nods toward the industrial character of Poblenou itself, a neighborhood long defined by its conversion from manufacturing to residential use.