Clara Crous’s architecture emerges from direct contact with construction. Educated at the Universitat de Girona and with an academic period at the Sapienza Università di Roma, her trajectory has always developed in close proximity to building sites, materials, and territory. This dual formation —technical and experiential— has shaped an approach in which architectural thinking remains inseparable from execution.
Before establishing her independent practice in 2017, she worked in several studios linked to architecture and construction in Catalonia, participating in both rehabilitation projects and industrialised building processes. Particularly significant was her experience in a company dedicated to prefabricated timber housing, where she became familiar with lightweight construction systems, the precision of technical design, and the importance of detail in the early phases of a project. This early understanding of timber as both a structural and cultural system has remained a constant in her later work.
From her studio based in the Empordà, Clara Crous develops architectural and rehabilitation projects grounded in a rigorous attention to place and to the people who inhabit it. Her practice follows a line that reclaims natural materials —wood, lime, clay, organic insulation— integrating them into contemporary solutions that avoid both formalism and nostalgia. More than a language, her architecture proposes a way of building: measured, conscious, and deeply connected to process.
Rehabilitation has been one of the pillars of her trajectory, understood as an exercise in reading time and respecting pre-existing conditions. In parallel, her new-build projects explore how to transfer this same material ethic into contemporary contexts, with particular attention to timber construction and to systems that allow greater control of the project from its origin.
Her work is defined by a meticulous approach to detail, as the consequence of an architecture conceived through experience. Space, light, temperature, tactility, and the ageing of materials form part of a perspective that understands architecture as something lived rather than merely observed.
Today, her practice continues to evolve from that initial coherence: a grounded architecture, technically precise and committed to more sustainable ways of inhabiting, where innovation is pursued as the natural outcome of an honest relationship between matter, place, and everyday life.
The studio’s projects have been featured in a range of local and international media outlets, including AD, Diseño Interior, On Diseño, and La Vanguardia.