In 2003, Monica Aguirre and Victor Ferrer inherited a four-story house in Barcelona that was more than a century old and in poor condition. When they decided to move in four years later, they sold the top two floors to finance the renovation of the bottom half. By that time, they were expecting a child (within a couple of years, they would have two) and were focused on the things that would be useful to their growing family.
On the ground floor, in a room looking out to the rear patio, they created a combined kitchen, dining area and family room, where they could perform household tasks while the children played with their toys. In the backyard, they added a small swimming pool for relief in the scorching summers.
“It was a little bit crazy,” recalled Ms. Aguirre, 49, a psychologist. Limited to 1,300 square feet across two floors, the couple understood that there would be sacrifices. Something had to give, and that something was a living room. For years, they didn’t have one.
As the children grew up, the lack of a ground-floor social space became nettlesome for both generations. Entertaining was a challenge. There was no place to watch a movie with a group of friends of any age. That’s when Eugeni Bach stepped in.
Mr. Bach is an architect who, with his wife and professional partner, Anna Bach, regularly socializes with Ms. Aguirre and Mr. Ferrer. He knows their interests, and he knows their home. When they came to him for help, he recalled, he was able to skip past the usual battery of questions to clients — “How do you want to live? What kinds of objects do you like? Blah, blah, blah,” in his words — and knuckle down to providing the living room they had forgone for so long.
But where to put it? The answer was not intuitively obvious, but made sense once Mr. Bach laid out his plan.
The living room would take the place of the kitchen, and the kitchen would move outside.
The architects conceived a roughly L-shaped glass annex that extended from the rear of the house over a portion of the walled backyard, from which the pool was removed.
Within the long part of the L, they placed a narrow kitchen with wood cabinetry and wood-sheathed appliances and a ribbon of glass doors, many of which open to the tiled patio and garden.
The kitchen is wider toward the entrance where the sink is situated, so that more than one person can maneuver comfortably around it, whereas the patio widens toward the rear, where there is room for seating under a lovely tree.
Because both Ms. Aguirre and Mr. Ferrer, 54, a businessman, often work from home, the stub of the L contains a desk with the same outdoor view and access. (A second-floor room also functions as an office, so each partner has a space to work without distracting the other.)
A glass roof crowns the entire addition. This feature, Mr. Bach said, was made possible by the home’s northern orientation and by the placement of surrounding buildings and trees, which prevented sun beams from hitting the glass directly and roasting the family. The inner layer of the double-pane roof is corrugated to screen views from the top two floors and to mask the leaves and dirt that invariably settle on horizontal surfaces. (From below, any detritus looks pleasantly like shadows.)
Coupled with the narrow width of the addition, the glass ensured that the ground floor’s existing open-plan interior kept its light and views. “In the end,” Mr. Bach said, “you have a very good kitchen, a very good studio, a very good living room and a very good dining room that all face the patio.”
And yet, he noted, though architectural modernists have historically championed the erasure of boundaries between inside and outside, too much glass can make inhabitants feel vulnerable to what lies beyond their walls. “You have the feeling that you are not wrapped, that you are not taken care of, by your own building,” he said. It is the difference between “showing you the outside and pushing you outside.”
This led the architects to design substantial wood dividers between the panes. The door frames are painted green to echo the tree leaves, and the trim that edges the glass is red orange, the same color as the new ceramic patio tiles.
Though they didn’t alter the plan of the house’s older portion, the architects softened the transition between the entrance and the living/dining room with a custom piece of casework that serves as a coat closet on one side and a living room cabinet on the other. They also designed a long dining bench that flips opens for storage, along with a credenza and bookshelves.
After some pandemic-related delays, the project was completed at the end of 2021, at a cost of about $128,000. Since then, Ms. Aguirre and Mr. Ferrer have seated up to 25 people at annual Christmas parties (a tight squeeze) in the room where their babies once played.
The children, who are now 17 and 16, were a little upset at the loss of their swimming pool, Ms. Aguirre said, but it was their turn to make a sacrifice. “They understand that they will leave and we will stay,” she said. “The house is for us.”
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