Some years after our first commissioned work at CASA ROC, followed by TWIN HOUSE, ROC CUBE and G-ROC, we carried out the final apartment renovation in the same property, located in the Barcelona’s Gothic quarter.

We made the most of the height of the property by dividing the space of some rooms into two levels. This maximised the actual volume of the house and resulted in the creation of restful areas.

Just when we thought that we had closed a cycle which CASA ROC, TWIN HOUSE, and ROC CUBE, one of the old apartments on the same building became vacant ahead of what was expected, so G-ROC became our fourth intervention on the building.  With three similar interventions finished, it was easy to identify a common denominator in terms of solutions, therefore defining and strengthening the distinguishing traits of this assignment.

With ROC CUBE we reached the end of a cycle, the renovation of three, very similar, but different apartments on a single building in Barcelona’s gothic quarter.

We were recently advised that in times of economic crisis, as architects, we had to look for a formula to obtain products with scalability to optimize our resources.  We understood that a product with scalability was the repetition of valid solutions from one project to the other, a difficult approach within the refurbishment industry. In the midst of that search for a common denominator the opportunity to rehabilitate ROC CUBE arrived- another diamond in the rough on the very same building where we had done two previous interventions: CASA ROC and TWIN HOUSE.

From the historic Gothic Quarter in Barcelona, a project for two adjacent apartments arrived to us, which turned out to be a diamond in the rough.

Our objective with this refurbishment with such a tight budget was to create an infrastructure that would hint out the user on how personalize it later. A carefully studied configuration of polyvalent and proportionate spaces multiplies the possibilities of two very small dwellings with very large potential.

Located in Barcelona’s historic Gothic Quarter, this residence was first found on a very precarious state.  Several interventions of different time periods and of low construction quality had accumulated, layering on top of the original construction. Its distribution was the result of common customs of the past in which the space was highly compartmentalized, generating small rooms with little or no natural light or ventilation.

A limited budget was an incentive for ingenious ideas and for scarifying features that are not essential in a one-user apartment, therefore a single sliding door, dubbed “3 in 1”, eliminates the need for multiple doors: one can choose to either close the bedroom, close the bathroom or close the water closet.