More than a place on the map, l’Empordà is a way of looking. Those of us who have lived there have savoured it. The light has weight, the wind has character and the forest, when left to itself, ends up ordering life. It is also the land of Susanna Cots, who from her studio in Peratallada has spent twenty-five years translating that gaze into interior space, as we showed in the monograph we devoted to her last spring.

In one of those forests, among century-old cedars and pines, lies Refuge in the Woods, the interior designer’s most recent project. A single-storey house, white, with a dark roof and stone walls, transformed for a couple of Scandinavian origin whose brief fitted into a single word: light. Everything else has been built from there, with an aim that inspires every decision in the project: that the forest should always be the protagonist.

The forest inhabits the interior

Susanna has designed the spaces so that each opening frames a fragment of the outdoors and brings it into the house like a living painting that changes with the seasons, with the time of day, with the rain falling on the leaves. In the indoor dining room, wrapped entirely in oak—floor, walls and ceiling in continuity—a large window frames the lawn and the cedars as if it were the room’s only artwork. In the living room, the natural pine joinery opens the view towards the pool and the vegetation, while the fireplace, set into a freestanding white volume, gathers the family around the fire on the days when the forest calls for retreat.

The palette accompanies this intention with discipline. Whites and stone tones broaden the perception of space and let natural light travel through each room without obstacles; the pale oak of the flooring and the timber of the joinery bring the warmth needed for that brightness to feel liveable. Chromatic neutrality works here as a resource rather than an aesthetic end. When the interior falls silent, the green of the forest appears in all its intensity. It is an idea very present in Susanna’s thinking: she understands light as an emotional language capable of activating, calming or gathering, and has learned, as she herself writes, to “tame light” so that it dialogues with the space and with the emotions of those who inhabit it.

The greenhouse, a seam between inside and out

The space at the heart of the project is the greenhouse. A light timber structure, with exposed beams and a grid of window frames that blends with the tree trunks in the garden, raised on a rubble-stone base reminiscent of the dry-stone walls of the Empordà landscape. At one with its surroundings, almost dissolved in them, it works as a refuge that inhabits winter and summer without losing its nature. It is the natural extension of the house, the place where light lingers longest and where the boundary between outside and inside dissolves.

Inside, a continuous timber bench runs along the perimeter on the stone base and turns the glass into a backrest for the landscape, with striped linen cushions and checks in earthy tones. Round jute rugs, low turned-wood tables and comfortable armchairs compose a living room that seems suspended in the garden; a few steps further on, beneath a cluster of natural-fibre lamps, a long table hosts shared meals and long after-dinner conversations. Outside, a black summer kitchen, sheltered under eaves from which the branches of a cedar hang down, completes these spaces, where the forest takes on its role as the main room.

A space tailored to every moment

The programme is precisely adjusted to the lives of its inhabitants. Two suites designed for rest, a study for moments of concentration and a shared area—kitchen and indoor living room—that sustains everyday life. In the suites, wood clads the headboard wall and the joinery frames the view towards the pool and the trees, so the day already begins facing the forest. The bathrooms work with a more tactile materiality: walls with a mineral finish, stone washbasins, aged brass taps and wooden mirrors, under overhead light that softly models the space.

The kitchen, white and linear, leads to a glazed door that opens onto the pool terrace, and shares the fireplace space with the living room, which acts both as a divider and as a meeting point. Both the kitchen and the rest of the furniture have been custom designed by the studio. Each piece responds to the exact place it occupies, to the light it receives, to the use for which it is intended. It is the quiet application of what Susanna calls the method of invisible elements, that which sustains the experience without needing to show itself. “Make the complex simple, make it go unnoticed”, sums up the interior designer.

A house to enjoy the light of l’Empordà

For a family from the north, where light is managed as a scarce commodity, settling in l’Empordà means learning to live with a different light, more generous and changeable. Refuge in the Woods accompanies that learning with discretion. Susanna Cots has designed a house that orders itself according to the rhythm of the forest, that changes with it and that accepts, as she maintains, that the home should be a reflection of our vital flow, just as a landscape evolves with the seasons. An architecture that, in the interior designer’s words, “is not explained, it is breathed”. And that, in this land of tramontana and clear skies, breathes in time with the trees.

Project: Refuge in the Woods.
Location: Empordà, Girona.
Layout: 2 suites, study, kitchen and indoor living room, greenhouse, outdoor dining and living areas.
Completed: 2026.
Interior design: Susanna Cots Interior Design.
Photography: Mauricio Fuertes.
Source: Susanna Cots Interior Design.

Susanna Cots

Some careers are built with projects, others, like that of Susanna Cots, with a way of seeing. From her first studio in l’Empordà in 2001 to her international expansion—with a second office in Hong Kong in 2014—her work has evolved as an ongoing investigation into emotional wellbeing. As a tangible experience: light, silence, memory and perception.

Few interior designers in Spain have developed a language as recognisable and coherent as that of Susanna Cots. Her work, born of a deep connection with nature and emotional wellbeing, unfolds from her studio in l’Empordà—a setting of serene beauty that permeates her creative philosophy—and has been recognised both nationally and internationally for its aesthetic and conceptual sensitivity.

Cots’s career is marked by a constant search for balance. Balance between light and shadow, fullness and emptiness, geometry and emotion. In her projects, spaces open up to silence and introspection, turning the everyday into an almost meditative experience. Natural light, noble materials and organic forms are the common threads of a narrative that speaks of wellbeing, honesty and essential beauty.

Her vision goes beyond decoration: it is a way of inhabiting. Each project is an invitation to reconnect with what matters, to reduce the superfluous and to embrace the harmony of simplicity. From private homes to boutique hotels and commercial spaces, Susanna Cots cultivates a style that transcends fashion and belongs to an aesthetic of the soul.

Behind the calm her interiors convey lies rigorous work, a deep knowledge of detail and a finely tuned intuition that reads each space with empathy. Because for Susanna Cots, designing is, above all, caring.

Two centuries-old houses reunited

Among these houses in Vulpellac there is one that brings together, under a single roof, two different eras: a fourteenth-century construction and a seventeenth-century extension, merged into a single two-storey home listed as national heritage. When the interior designer Clara Lleal received the commission for its restoration, the house had lost much of its character under layers of unrelated interventions, strident colour combinations, mismatched materials, a coherence diluted by the years. The purpose of the project, is summed up in the name the studio gave it: Recovering the calm.

Stone, lime and memory

The intervention began with what could not be seen. The walls of the ground floor carried rising damp aggravated by cement renders that prevented their natural transpiration; removing them and replacing them with lime stuccoes restored to the building one of its oldest functions, that of breathing. In that same process a window appeared, bricked up since the time when part of the house functioned as the village grocery store, its recovery not only restores the original reading of the façade, it also lets light return in depth to spaces that had gone decades without it.

On that basis, the interior designer unified the house with a continuous stone-toned microcement floor, extended across both storeys, staircase and bathrooms, as a gesture that erases the seams between the old and the added. The new staircase was designed as a sequence of monochromatic planes that integrates into the whole; a single Il Fanale lamp, placed at floor level, is enough to give it a sculptural presence.

A house to inhabit slowly

The ground floor brings together the daytime spaces around a patio with a porch, while the upper floor houses an open study and three bedrooms. From the entrance, a wide hallway organises the circulation towards the different spaces.

In the living room, the low height of the vaulted ceiling led to ruling out any technical lighting in favour of an indirect, intimate light; an antique chair, restored while respecting the original tone of its wood, converses with a Vibia lamp in a contrast between the old and the contemporary that repeats throughout the house. The kitchen gained surface area by removing a partition wall that hid two panels of exposed stone, and is organised around an antique cast-iron cooking range; the table, chairs and lamps are pieces sourced in France. Outside, the patio recovered the original tone of the exposed brick of its vault after removing years of climbing plants that were overloading the walls.

Quiet, timeless spaces on the upper floor

Upstairs, the study brings together an antique table and chair with a work by Carla Tarruella that integrates into the general atmosphere of the space. The three bedrooms continue the same discourse of neutrality and sobriety. In the main suite, a large pencil drawing by Marcos Isamat lends depth through the subtlety of its lines; the second bedroom is furnished with vintage pieces from Casa Azul Bisbal and DCW Éditions lamps; the third preserves a medieval window, for which a light timber frame was designed that leaves historic architecture as the sole protagonist. The bathrooms follow the same formal refinement, with built-in white furniture, marble countertop washbasins and classically inspired mirrors.

The decisive role of August, the owner

The involvement of August, owner of the house and co-author in practice of a project that is also his own, has been decisive. His was the unhurried search through antique dealers and vintage shops in Catalonia and France —among them Casa Azul Bisbal and Espacio Noguera— to find each piece of furniture, and his the judgement with which, after touring galleries, he chose the works of art for the different spaces. The result is an essential house, with a palette reduced to whites, off-whites and natural wood, in which every object has a reason to be there and in which the absence of artifice becomes the true luxury.

More than a renovation, the project is a reconciliation with the history of the place, one that silences the noise accumulated over decades so that a centuries-old architecture can breathe again as it deserves. Between centuries-old walls of stone, lime and natural light, this house in Vulpellac recovers the calm it treasured for so many years, the same calm that can be breathed in the streets of the whole town.

Project: Recuperar la calma.
Location: Vulpellac, Baix Empordà.
Autoría: Clara Lleal Interiorista y August Mabilon.
Photography: Maria Pujol.
Furniture: Casa Azul Bisbal y Espacio Noguera, tiendas vintage.
Rugs: Zara Home.
Lighting: Nemo, Vibia, Il Fanale, Lyte, DCW Éditions, Louis Poulsen, Santa & Cole, Karman.
Art: Carla Tarruella, Marcos Isamat.
Fittings: Fontini, Font Barcelona.
Source: Clara Lleal.

Clara Lleal

Clara Lleal trained as an interior designer at the Escola Massana in Barcelona, and has since worked with the conviction that interior spaces shape the way we live, which is why they deserve the same care as any other important decision in life.

Her career begins in the late nineties designing shop windows for the major bookstores of the RBA/Edipresse group, and takes definitive shape in the year 2000, when she co-founds the Cm2 Disseny studio in Barcelona, where for two decades she develops residential and contract projects. Between 2003 and 2015 she also takes on the Spanish distribution of the Italian furniture firm FIAPP International. That journey, made up of very different projects, ends up settling into a criterion of her own, a natural and warm interior design, of simple lines and durable materials, in which Nordic influence coexists with the Mediterranean roots of Catalonia, where she lives and works.

In 2019 that criterion finds a home of its own. Lleal founds her studio in Badalona, Clara Lleal Interiorista, of which she is creative director, and from which she carries out residential and commercial interior architecture projects. “Living better through design” sums up, in her own words, what she pursues in every project. We spend most of our lives in interior spaces, so these should inspire us and make us feel good.

A painter and ceramicist in her free time, Lleal brings that craft sensibility to her projects, where handmade, one-of-a-kind pieces are never lacking. That same eye, attentive to craftsmanship and to what is made by hand, has taken her work beyond the studio, her projects have been published in trend blogs, magazines and books in more than forty countries, and she has served on international interior design juries.

The most visible recognition of this stage came with Casa Galería de Arte, distinguished in 2023 with the Best of the Best award at the Architecture MasterPrize (Los Angeles) and a Special Mention at the German Design Award (Frankfurt), after already having received in 2022 the Overall Winner award at the SBID International Design Awards (London), having been a finalist at the IDA International Design Awards, and having been named Project of the Year by the Italian portal Archilovers.

That same logic of resistance and prudence is what has guided the rehabilitation of Can Pou, the farmhouse that Nordest Arquitectura —the studio founded by Jordi Riembau Ribot and Miquel Rusca Mestre— has renewed on an extensive plot in the Serra de Daró, in the heart of the Baix Empordà. The architects have not sought to make the whole a statement through new gestures, but to establish a dialogue with the history of the place. The house is conceived as a refuge that respects its past while opening its doors to new ways of inhabiting it, letting the materials, the light and the openings do the talking. The result is an architecture that moves with subtlety, seeking that balance between memory and renewal that is rarely achieved without giving up one of the two terms.

A semi-outdoor space where a staircase once stood

The project pivots on two precise interventions. The first affects the very heart of the farmhouse: the central space, previously fragmented by a staircase that split it in two, is now transformed into a semi-outdoor core that directly connects the entrance to the house with the south garden. The interior walls that define it behave as if they were façades, and the staircase —resolved with exposed concrete railings that contrast with the original stone— orders the routes and the levels, up to a protected study on the upper floor. The effect is that of an almost outdoor realm, halfway between the hallway and the courtyard, where light enters from several fronts, vegetation looks in from the garden and the materials —stone, concrete, wood— coexist without disguising their condition as a contemporary addition to a century-old building. It is in this core, more than at any other point in the house, that Can Pou reveals its character: sober, dense, with the solidity demanded by a farmhouse of this historical weight.

A glazed porch turned toward the garden

The second intervention unfolds toward the side of the kitchen, where a porch combines solid and glazed strips to accommodate the dining area and the barbecue zone, with a direct visual connection to the garden. It is here that the renovation becomes more domestic and less monumental. A space conceived for everyday life, for meals outdoors and for that relationship with the landscape which, in the Empordà, is never a decorative addition but an essential part of the experience of inhabiting it. The side bays of the house, in soft tones and natural wood joinery, offer a space of calm, while the central core —stone, concrete and wood worked without artifice— concentrates the character of the whole.

This whole sequence culminates in the south façade, resolved largely with glazed surfaces that fuse interior and exterior without the farmhouse losing its roots for it: the stone remains stone, and the glass does not compete with it but frames it.

Nordest Arquitectura has frequently worked on the built heritage of the Empordà, and Can Pou confirms that approach. The rehabilitation does not seek to return the farmhouse to an idealised image of the past, but to bring it up to date without the effort showing. The spaces are designed, as the architects themselves explain, «to invite tranquillity and connection with nature», with corners where tradition and contemporaneity coexist naturally. Every detail —the stone, the wood, the light— brings warmth and character, giving the house, in the studio’s words, «a gentle yet emphatic presence». It is, at bottom, the same quality that Pla attributed to the landscape surrounding it: nothing excessive, and yet nothing indifferent.

Project: Casa 2302. Can Pou.
Location: Serra de Daró, Baix Empordà, Girona
Built area: 602 m²
Completed: 2025
Architecture: Nordest Arquitectura.
Architects: Jordi Riembau Ribot y Miquel Rusca Mestre
Design team: Nordest Arquitectura.
Technical architect: José Bahillo González
Construction company: Construccions Josep Alsina.
Structure: Estructures Calonge.
Installations: ITG Instal·ladora Tècnica Gironina 2020.
Joinery: Fernández Fusters.
Kitchen: Cuines i Banys Prisman.
Ironwork: Forjats Fonteta.
Aluminium: Aluminis i Vidres Bisbal.
Blinds: Persiana Barcelona.
Materials: hormigón visto, piedra natural, mortero de cal
Photography: Filippo Poli.

Nordest Arquitectura

At Nordest, every project begins with a careful reading of the terrain: the climate, the materials and the history that give a place its identity. That analysis is what later guides the design decisions — how a building is sited, how it opens to the outside, how it protects itself, what relationship it establishes with its surroundings — and what allows the materials to create a natural continuity between the architecture and the landscape. The studio understands design as a tool for shaping a way of life: each project must respond to a specific programme while also building an experience of its own — a way of entering, of looking, of resting, of sharing, of taking shelter and of opening up to the surroundings — one in which sustainability is not added at the end but is born with the design itself, taking shape in the siting, the orientation, the climatic protection and the choice of materials. To this criterion is added close collaboration with those who will inhabit each space, listening to their needs and their way of life until they are transformed into an architecture with its own identity. As the studio itself puts it, «to design is to give shape to a way of putting down roots».

Nordest Arquitectura was founded in Palau-sator (Girona) in 2016 and works on projects of different scales, taking on private and public commissions that span residential, hospitality, educational and cultural uses. The studio specialises in both new-build work and renovations and rehabilitations, including listed buildings and protected heritage settings, and its projects have been published in numerous media outlets and the specialist press.

Its built work includes several houses built and rehabilitated since 2016, among which casa 1510, casa 1603, casa 1615 and casa 1707 stand out, along with the renovation of its own studio in 2018, that of the La Bionda hotel in 2020, that of the wall in La Bisbal d’Empordà in 2021 and that of the access road to Port Lligat in 2022. The studio is currently developing projects on the Costa Brava, in the provinces of Girona, Barcelona, Madrid and Mallorca, and has also worked in Canada and Senegal, as well as beginning projects in several countries in the Middle East.

Nordest Arquitectura has twice been awarded at the Girona Provincial Architecture Awards, in 2019 and 2021, and has been shortlisted on several further occasions for these same awards, organised by the Catalan Association of Architects. It was selected for the German Design Awards 2023, and its projects have taken part in the FAD Awards and the European Award for Architectural Heritage Intervention. The studio has also served on the jury of the Buildner architecture competitions and has given lectures on its work at the Catalan Association of Architects.

Jordi Riembau Ribot, (1975. Sant Feliu de Boada (Girona)), has been an architect from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia since 2003. After working at several architecture studios in Barcelona, in 2004 he founded, together with Anna López, the studio TAB_arquitectes, and in 2011 he set up his own practice, This IS Estudi d’Arquitectura, focused on commissions in the province of Girona, principally in the Baix Empordà area. In early 2016 he partnered with Miquel Rusca to form This IS Estudi d’Arquitectura SLP, the forerunner of what in 2018 would become Nordest Arquitectura SLP.

Miquel Rusca Mestre, (1987 Sant Sadurní de l’Heura (Girona)), has been an architect from the Girona School of Architecture since 2014. He spent six years working at the family firm of Domènec Rusca before joining the Hidalgo-Hartmann studio in Barcelona in 2012. In 2014 he began collaborating with Jordi Riembau at This IS Estudi d’Arquitectura SLP, a partnership he formally joined in 2016, and with whom he founded Nordest Arquitectura SLP in 2018.

The system dissolved over the course of the twentieth century, with the mechanization of farming and rural exodus, but the houses remained standing. Today, much of that minor heritage is being renovated for new uses — in many cases as rural tourism accommodation, or as family housing, like this former casa de masovers in Solius, in the Baix Empordà, whose full renovation is signed by A! Emotional living & work and estudioDOM.

The commission came from a family seeking to enjoy the Mediterranean character of l’Empordà with a lifestyle turned toward the outdoors. The project recovers the 250 m² built across two floors and adds two newly built outdoor spaces — a pergola and a summer dining area — following the owners’ wishes.

Mediterranean blue, the connecting thread

Against the white and light wood that dominate the rest of the house, a single shade of Mediterranean blue runs through the whole home. It is the color of the interior joinery, doors and windows, and also of the facade shutters. This color acts as a standout element that unifies old and new under a single criterion.

An open space for the day area

On the ground floor, the day area is resolved as an open, continuous space. The kitchen, in white with exposed joinery in the same blue as the shutters, is organized around a peninsula that acts as a transition toward the dining room and adds a breakfast area. Hydraulic tile, suspended brass lamps, and a wooden display cabinet with glass doors give character to a space designed for everyday use.

The dining room, next to the kitchen, revolves around a round solid-wood table. A vertical-slat divider separates it visually from the living room without interrupting the light between the two rooms. In the living room, the white-framed fireplace and an aged paneled mirror concentrate the life of the house in the cold months; a second slat divider, independent from the one in the dining room, serves as a backrest for the sofa and dialogues with the custom joinery of the shelving. A space designed both for summer evenings facing the garden and for winter days by the fire.

Main bedroom open to the garden

On the sleeping floor, the main bedroom opens onto the garden through two large blue windows. The atmosphere is built with a few well-chosen elements —a tufted upholstered headboard, a chest of drawers with rustic lines, a valet stand— set against walls in neutral tones and textiles in blue-green, in a space that deliberately renounces accumulation.

The outdoor garden, with the new pergola as protagonist of the renovation

If something sets this project apart, it is that much of its brief was resolved outside the existing walls. The centerpiece is a wooden pergola built to measure for the space, raised on a deck and enclosed on its perimeter with lattice screens, with views over the Empordà landscape, a space designed to prolong summer sobremesas in the shade of the pines. Next to it, a porch already existing in the house has been transformed into a summer dining area, with a wooden kitchen and a masonry barbecue clad in exposed brick, and a large dining table.

That commitment to the outdoors is the logical continuation of the spirit of the original house, an agricultural structure always conceived in direct relation to the land surrounding it. The casa de masovers in Solius no longer works the land, but it still organizes itself around it, and in that —more than in the stone or the tile it retains— lies its continuity with the history the building preserves.

Project: Full renovation, Casa de masovers.
Location: Solius, Baix Empordà (Girona).
Scope: Full interior design of the home + design and construction of new pergola and barbecue area.
Surface area: 250 m² across two floors.
Completed: 2026.
Interior design and creative direction: A! Emotional living & work y estudioDOM — Araceli Usón y Varvara Shabardina.
Photography: Estella Rotger Marti.
Styling: Sol Van Dorssen.
Source: Boutique de Comunicación.

Araceli Usón. A! Emotional living&work

Araceli Usón trained as an interior designer at the Escuela Internacional de Diseñadores Interioristas y Arte de Catalunya (DIAC-EIADE), graduating in 1989. Even before completing her studies, she was already at work on projects at Estudio DSAN in Barcelona, alongside Estrella Salietti and Mª José Ankli. That first stage was followed by more than two decades — from 1989 to 2011 — at AM Asociados, developing renovation, full-scope residential, retail, and hospitality projects: the years in which she built much of the judgment that defines her work today.

In 2012 she founded her own studio in Sant Cugat del Vallès, A! Emotional living & work. There she develops residential and professional projects with a single aim: that functionality and beauty coexist without hierarchy, and that every element of a space speak to the whole. The result is interiors built with noble materials, soft palettes, and sustained attention to texture, conceived to endure beyond the moment’s trends. Her portfolio includes residential renovations in the Barcelona neighborhoods of Sagrada Família, Tres Torres, and Gran Via, and commercial spaces such as the Marc Cain stores and the headquarters of COGAC (Col·legi Oficial de Gestors Administratius de Catalunya).

In 2014 she founded estudioDOM together with Elisabet Sanuy and Varvara Shabardina, partners with whom she brings more than thirty years of combined experience. The studio develops comprehensive residential interior design projects, from concept through to turnkey delivery, with a client list that includes international owners of homes in Barcelona and the Costa Brava.

The method, in both studios, is the same: listen before proposing. Every project begins with a dialogue with the client, in which needs, personalities, and ways of living or working are translated into concrete spatial solutions, supported by a multidisciplinary team — interior designers, architects, construction specialists — that carries the process through from start to finish. Usón sums up this working ethic in three words: honesty, rigor, and innovation.

For centuries, agriculture shaped these hillsides into horizontal platforms — the feixes of the Catalan tradition — that order the terrain, retain the earth and orient the gaze toward the valley. When Bouman takes on the commission, he accepts that pre-existing geography as the project’s point of departure. The site is organised as a sequence of stepped terraces, each with its own use: the vegetable garden, the swimming pool, the parking area, the outdoor terrace. The house occupies the uppermost platform, the widest one, with the best views. From there, the valley opens in its full extent. The implantation extends the order the landscape already had.

Form and energy performance

Bouman designs a square plan. A decision that in another context might seem arbitrary here carries its own justification: compactness reduces the envelope surface relative to the habitable volume, with a direct impact on the building’s energy performance. The pitched roof completes that logic: it adapts the volume to the slope of the terrain, reduces its visual presence in the landscape and organises the interior section into two levels that allow the space beneath the roof to be inhabited with full dignity.

Inside, the central transverse space acts as the backbone of the house: entrance hall, kitchen, living room and dining room follow one another without partitions between them, forming a continuous band that connects the two main façades. The four corners accommodate the bedrooms; the bathroom and laundry room are positioned along the sides. The layout is generous without being excessive; each room has the right amount of space.

Nearly zero energy consumption standards

The energy performance of the house results from the sum of decisions that reinforce one another. Insulation is enhanced throughout the envelope. The aerothermal system handles both climate control and domestic hot water production. The compact form minimises thermal bridges and reduces transmission losses. The whole approaches nearly zero energy consumption standards without seeking certifications that are not, in this case, the goal: beyond a label, efficiency here is a consequence of projective rigour.

Casa Boratuna was selected for the Premis d’Arquitectura de Girona 2025, a recognition that confirms the soundness of a proposal that resolves a demanding domestic programme with both effectiveness and sensitivity in a landscape of great value.

Project: Casa Boratuna.
Typology: vivienda unifamiliar aislada.
Location: Vall del Llémena, Girona.
Completed: 2024.
Architect: Victor Bouman.
Collaborators: RSC Arquitectura, Construccions Marc i Jou, ELKE Windows, Fustech, Rajoleria Quintana, Piscines Blanes.
Photography: Pol Viladoms.
Awards: obra seleccionada, Premis d’Arquitectura de Girona 2025.
Source: Bouman Arquitectura.

Victor Bouman

Víctor Bouman is part of a generation of architects who have turned simplicity into a form of precision and made the landscape their main ally. An architect trained at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB, 2016), his work today unfolds between Girona and the Costa Brava, where he designs quiet, compact homes that are deeply attentive to the climate and to the real lives of those who inhabit them.

In 2020 he founded Bouman Arquitectura, a studio based in Girona and Llançà (Costa Brava) that is defined above all by a calm, straightforward and honest way of working. From these two bases, urban yet very close to the territory, the studio works with private clients and developers on new-build projects, refurbishments, interior design, retail and landscape, guided by a clear thread: creating spaces that are easy to live in, quiet and sustainable, where architecture does not impose itself on life but supports it discreetly. View full biography.

The city grew in the shadow of the monastery of Sant Esteve, founded in the ninth century, and for centuries lived from agriculture and water. The streets of the historic centre preserve an unmistakable medieval character — façades where time has left its mark without anyone rushing to erase it. Banyoles has the quiet quality of places that have never needed to reinvent themselves, that have continued being what they were while the world accelerated around them.

It is in this particular city that interior designer Maite Prats works, and it is difficult not to see in her understanding of space a resonance with the surrounding environment. Here stands the house at the centre of this project — one of those houses that refuses to be erased, that has a way of being in the world, a proportion, a relationship with the street, a manner of receiving morning light, that resists any attempt at substitution. Built in 1929, it had preserved intact a way of living that Prats chose to honour. The name given to the project says everything: Palimpsest — a manuscript written over without fully erasing what came before, where the new text coexists with traces of the old, and that coexistence is precisely what gives it character.

The original house

The intervention unfolds across two distinct volumes. The original house contains shared life: kitchen, dining room, living room, circulation spaces, and a sleeping loft that makes use of the roof’s full height. In this volume, the work consists above all in recovery. Openings and proportions are restored; spaces compressed by the accumulation of time are freed. In the main room, the most radical decision is also the most eloquent. The reed ceiling is removed to expose the original structure — the timber truss that had remained hidden for decades. The section becomes the space itself, and the recovered height multiplies the entry of light and transforms the perception of the volume.

The extension

The extension, new building housing the night zone and service spaces, approaches the historic house with the caution of someone who understands that not every encounter need be an embrace. Between the two volumes a gap remains, a space that allows each to be read independently, making legible what was already there and what has since arrived. The new body does not imitate the language of the original house, nor does it compete with its historicist ornament — the stone balls on the pinnacles, the window mouldings, the worked render — but instead adopts a register of its own: quiet and material. Board-formed concrete with a modulation that echoes the rhythm of the interior paving, lacquered steel joinery, wooden shutters that calibrate the relationship between inside and out.

The garden, heart of the project

The garden is the heart of the project. It is the garden that articulates the sequence between the two buildings, that establishes the route and gives meaning to the existing change in level. That difference in grade, far from being a problem, becomes the instrument that allows semi-subterranean spaces to open toward controlled light, that connects levels through walkways and porches, that makes visible in every movement the relationship between what has been inherited and what has been added. A pool-basin lined with natural stone in a green tone — the same green as the water that inhabits the lake — is integrated among the planting until the boundary between architecture and landscape dissolves. A small pre-existing structure in the courtyard is kept and transformed into a dining room, with bamboo furniture and a large arched door that, when open, turns the exterior into interior in the most natural way.

A precise and coherent materiality

Inside, the materiality is precise and coherent. Oak flooring runs through the main level, establishing a continuity that unites kitchen, dining room, and living room; polished concrete appears in the zones most closely bound to the ground and the garden. In the bathrooms, white tile and a stone skirting construct a clean, enduring atmosphere. The kitchen furniture is designed specifically for the geometry of the space, without seeking prominence. In the loft — that secret space beneath the truss, with its two low beds, its stacked books, and hemp ropes as the only balustrade — the informality is entirely deliberate: a place to inhabit differently, at another scale and in another time.

Palimpsest is a project that trusts in the intelligence of time. It adds layers because the contemporary way of living required it, without erasing traces out of self-consciousness or displaying them out of nostalgia. What remains, in the end, is an architecture that knows where it stands, that knows its own history, and that has decided — with precision and without flourish — how to continue writing it.

Project: Palimpsest.
Location: Banyoles, Girona.
Area: 294 m².
Completed: 2025.
Authorship: Estudi Maite Prats Arquitectura Interior — Maite Prats, interior designer.
Collaborators: Mariana Colmenero, arquitecta; Guillermo Corsunsky, arquitecto; Aurora Gavaldà, arquitecta.
Photography: Marc Torra / Fragments.
Source: Estudi Maite Prats.

Maite Prats

Maite Prats works from Banyoles, in the heart of inland Catalonia, with a practice she has built patiently — from this singular city that has undoubtedly shaped her understanding of space. Trained as an interior designer at the DIAC in Barcelona, she completed a Master’s in Ephemeral Architecture at Elisaba. She founded her studio in 2009 and has led it since as Creative Director, alongside architects Mariana Colmenero, Guillermo Corsunsky, and Aurora Gavaldà.

Each project begins with a careful reading of the place: its proportions, its light, its history. From that reading, Prats works through reduction — stripping away the superfluous to arrive at the essential — with the conviction that the most significant decisions are also the most restrained. Natural light is an element that structures, defines atmospheres, articulates the depth of materials, and gives measure to time. Materials, for their part, are chosen for their honesty and permanence, for their capacity to age with dignity and to establish a sincere relationship with whoever inhabits the space.

Prats pursues coherent ones: places where calm and clarity are conditions of habitability. That ethical orientation is recognisable throughout her work, from residential interventions to the commercial and hospitality projects that form part of her trajectory.

The studio holds a long series of recognitions at the Girona Interior Design Biennial, where it has received awards in successive editions from 1997 to 2024, as well as mentions at the Premios Coac de Girona and a finalist placement at the FAD Interiorismo Awards in 2018. In 2008, her work was included in the publication Minimalisme, la sobrietat en la Arquitectura — a title that could serve as an inadvertent synthesis of her own method.

The owners, long rooted in the village, wanted a house where they could host family members who live far away, especially during the winter months. The possibility of use as a holiday rental completes the programme. Two distinct functions, with shared objectives: comfort, spatial quality and attention to detail.

The most decisive gesture of the intervention is the reorganisation of the programme. Concentrating the daytime spaces on the ground floor allows the kitchen, dining room and living area to coexist beneath the Catalan vaults that have structured the building since its origin. These brick structures, which for decades sheltered workbenches and tools, now become the spatial engine of the house. Their geometry orders the circulation, calibrates the scale and keeps the memory of the workshop alive. The upper floors are given over to the bedrooms and private areas, distinguishing between the shared and the private.

Restoration rather than addition

The materiality of the project is built from restoration rather than addition. The finishes added in previous interventions were removed, allowing the original walls of stone masonry and solid brick to speak. Lime mortars and stuccos allow the surfaces to breathe and return texture and light to the interiors. The recovered handmade toba paving on the ground floor and the ceramic pieces on the upper floors complete a palette that speaks directly to the constructive tradition of the place. In the bathrooms, handcrafted red ceramic and natural marble basins form compositions of remarkable material density.

The three-layer spruce wood, used in the interior joinery and the kitchen, introduces a warmth that balances the weight of the stone. The kitchen, organised around a natural marble island, becomes the focal point of the daytime space, generating a natural gathering place beneath the springing of the vaults.

The lighting follows the same criterion of material precision. Pieces by Santa Cole, Islas, Nemo, Siete Formas and Mayice are distributed across the different spaces with the logic of the well-chosen object: each light fitting has a defined scale, position and function.

The front courtyard

Outside, the front courtyard recovers its role as threshold between the street and the house, with a pool clad in handcrafted stoneware and a dense planting of Mediterranean species that turns the enclosure into an intimate, sheltered garden.

The upper terrace

The upper terrace, accessible from the first floor, opens the house to the agricultural landscape of the Empordà with a generosity that contrasts with the containment of the lower floors.

The renewal of this building develops an architecture understood as a practice of care. Crous works on the existing with an attitude that seeks continuity as its outcome. The workshop is still there, recognisable in its arches and walls, while the house settles into it bringing contemporary comfort. An architecture that preserves the memory of the building for the enjoyment of its new inhabitants.

Materials

Lime render on façade. Stone masonry and solid brick. Microcement on ground floor. Fired terracotta on first and second floors. Lime stucco on wall surfaces. Exposed stone on bed headboards. Pigmented limewash in dining room. Lacquered pine exterior joinery. Three-layer spruce wood for doors and kitchen. Natural marble worktops. Handcrafted red ceramic in bathrooms.

Furniture. Lighting

Teula Raig and Mig Con by Islas. Marseille by Le Corbusier by Nemo. Luna by Siete Formas. Hi by Mayice. Aurum by Ferm Living. Cestita by Santa Cole.

Project: La Fusteria.
Location: Vilamacolum, Alt Empordà.
Built area: 232 m². Plot: 116 m².
Completion: 2025.
Interior architecture: Clara Crous.
Design team: Jordi Collell Puig, Amanda Soler Vela.
Photography: Montse Capdevila.
Contractor: Manolo Martínez.
Carpentry: Deco Fusta Pey.
Metalwork: Moragas Salvans.
Kitchen: 7Vetes.
Microcement: Ingremic.
Source: Linka News. Lucia Zabala.

Clara Crous

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. See full biography.

The brief was to transform the building without betraying its character. The client was looking for something that might be described as a rural loft: a luminous, generously laid-out space from which its inhabitants could connect with the surroundings and take in the long views across the Empordà plain.

The architects’ response was to take the original materials and constructive elements as the starting point and guide for the project. The south facade, with its two large semicircular openings in handmade brick — originally designed to let in light from the south and dry the straw stored on the upper floors — and the robust north facade of stone, fifty centimetres thick, thus became the founding elements of the intervention.

The interior courtyard, heart of the home

The most significant move in the project is the creation of a courtyard inside the building, on the other side of the original wooden entrance door. This void — which symbolically recovers the space once occupied by agricultural machinery — solves the problem of light and ventilation in a ground floor with almost no openings, while at the same time organising the entire layout of the home: to its left, the living room, kitchen and dining area; to its right, a multipurpose workspace. The folding glass doors of both spaces can be opened fully onto the courtyard, dissolving the boundary between inside and outside and turning the ground floor into a fluid sequence of connected rooms. At the centre, the staircase occupies a double-height space that shares the role of structural and luminous heart of the house with the courtyard itself.

Stone takes centre stage indoors

The north stone wall, fully preserved and thermally insulated from the outside, transitions from being the skin of the building to becoming the matter of its interiors. To allow its presence to unfold across its full width and height, the first-floor slab does not cover the entire building, letting the kitchen and dining area rise up to the roof in a double-height space that establishes visual connections between both levels, keeping in full view that irregular, living, history-laden stone wall.
In this area, the brick party wall that reveals the prestressed concrete beams is also preserved, making legible the different eras and constructive layers that coexist within the building. The original materials — stone, brick, timber — contribute texture and historical density; the new ones — ceramic floor tiles, oak joinery, white lacquered metal, plaster, earth render and poplar wood in the kitchen — respond with smoother surfaces, pastel tones and a contemporary quality that does not compete with the existing fabric but frames it and brings it to life. Even the original roof timber beam finds a new purpose, reused as a bench in the entrance space.

The semicircular arches define the geometry of the home

The semicircular arch, present from the outset in the south facade and in the two interior structural arches, becomes the leitmotif of the entire intervention. Once the intermediate floor slab was introduced, the large facade arches were hidden from the ground floor, visible only from the upper bedrooms and from outside. The architects therefore reintroduced that language into the interior: new semicircular arches separate the kitchen and dining area from the living room, and a quarter-circle element marks the transition between the staircase and the kitchen zone, incorporating a new structural pillar at the same time. Both gestures — the arch and the curve — are presented as sculptural objects within the home, pieces that condense the formal memory of the building and project it into its new spaces.

The result is a house that finds its own rhythm between the intimate scale of the more sheltered rooms, characteristic of Catalan rural architecture, and the expansive generosity of the courtyard and the double-height spaces: a play of materials, geometries, light and time that makes it possible to inhabit the past in full present-day comfort.

Project: Can Gori.
Location: Peralada, Alt Empordà, Girona.
Conversion of a barn into a family home.
Area: 150 m².
Completion: 2023.
Architects: Paola Bagna & Jonas Labbé.
Technical architect: Imma Ferrer.
Structure: Codi Estudi.
Building services: Enclos.
Carpenter: Sayo.
Builder: Construccions Godó.
Photography: Arnau Rovira Vidal.
Source: Paola Bagna.

Paola Bagna

Born in Empuriabrava, on the coastline of the Alt Empordà, Paola Bagna trained as an architect at two schools that define her understanding of the discipline: the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona and the Technische Universität Berlin. A dual education that foreshadows what would become a career shaped by movement, cultural exchange and the ability to adapt to very different built environments.

With more than fifteen years of professional practice, Bagna has developed private residential projects and commercial spaces in London, Barcelona, Paris, Berlin and Abidjan. A scattered geography that gives shape to her working model, which she herself describes as “everyday nomadism”: rather than a fixed office, a network of collaborators and shared workspaces in Catalonia and Berlin from which she directs each project with the same attention and commitment as if she were in a single place. It is within this framework that Paola Bagna Architect operates — her international studio, a light and efficient structure designed to respond nimbly to commissions across different countries and contexts.

The studio’s work always begins with one essential premise: listening. Before any formal effort, Bagna takes time to understand what the client wants and to carefully measure the space she is about to work with. From that precise knowledge of the place, she develops initial sketches, works in three dimensions and maintains a continuous dialogue with the client until every detail has been refined. This methodology proves especially meaningful in small-scale projects, where, as she points out, “proposals depend greatly on the centimetres more or less available”.

The typology that fascinates her most is housing, and within it, the transformation of what already exists. Her architecture is rooted in respect for and reinterpretation of the built fabric, adapting it to new uses and new ways of living. In this process, materials play a central role: for Bagna, they must converse with one another naturally and with a certain nobility, and above all, they must age well — gaining presence over time and acquiring a beautiful patina through use. This sensitivity towards matter has led her to explore reuse as a practice, salvaging pieces and elements from one project to incorporate into another, as happened with the early twentieth-century parquet rescued from a project in Paris that eventually became the furniture designed for Galatea Wine, a wine bar in Berlin.

A singular chapter of her career unfolded between 2015 and 2017, when Bagna moved to Abidjan to lead the rehabilitation of a two-thousand-square-metre house built in the nineteen-sixties — designed by architect Henri Chomette — with the aim of transforming it into an eighteen-room boutique hotel. That experience in Côte d’Ivoire, intense and entirely without routine, broadened her ability to work within complex construction environments and consolidated an outlook open to experimentation and cultural exchange — a dimension she also explored through Electropique, a project she organised there combining music and architecture as a form of community encounter. Today, based between Empuriabrava and Berlin, and fluent in five languages, Paola Bagna continues to pursue the same goal in every project: spaces that improve the lives of those who inhabit them, built with simplicity, functionality and an attention to detail that is never taken for granted.

Located on the Serrat de la Cadalt, the intervention addresses the rehabilitation of a traditional farmhouse that had fallen into disuse over time. Rather than a radical transformation, the project is conceived as an exercise in understanding and respect for what already exists. The architecture approaches the building with an almost archaeological attitude: first understanding the logic of the place, its typology, and its construction, and intervening only where strictly necessary.

The result is a contemporary reinterpretation of Catalan rural tradition. The original volume of the farmhouse and its typological organization are preserved, as are the dimensions of the existing spaces. Each room adapts to a new domestic program without altering the building’s character, allowing the architecture to retain its material memory while accommodating a new life within.

The house also responds to a personal story. Its new inhabitants, the British designer Terence Woodgate and his partner, chose to leave their life in London to begin a new chapter in the quiet landscape of Girona. The dwelling thus becomes the setting for a life transition that reflects a broader shift in contemporary ways of living and working: the possibility of developing a professional activity from anywhere in the world, in direct contact with nature.

The historic structure as a starting point

The intervention begins with the traditional construction system of the farmhouses in Girona, characterized by load-bearing limestone walls built with irregular masonry and lime mortar. Corners and structural elements were originally executed with carefully cut ashlar stone, providing stability to the whole.

Following the restoration of the stone walls, the project incorporates a layer of cork thermal insulation that improves the building’s energy performance. Inside, a second skin is introduced, increasing luminosity, facilitating maintenance, and discreetly integrating the installations required for contemporary living. The flooring, also in limestone, maintains material continuity with the original architecture.

The interior is conceived as an intermediate territory between architecture and design. Every decision seeks precision: electrical outlets are flush with the surfaces, junctions between construction elements are resolved at a single point, and the spatial language avoids any superfluous gesture. It is a conscious dialogue between the existing and the contemporary, where the new intervention is clearly legible while the building’s memory remains intact.

Spaces that reinterpret rural memory

The interior organization unfolds across three levels that reinterpret the traditional uses of the farmhouse. On the access level are the kitchen and living room. The kitchen incorporates the triple height of the existing tower, becoming the vertical heart of the home, while the living room opens towards views of the Cadalt hills.

On the upper floor, two bedrooms take advantage of the original structural configuration. Meanwhile, the lower level recovers the former space used for animals, transforming it into a multipurpose room for new domestic uses.

An annex volume that once housed agricultural tools has been restored to become a garage. Above it, a studio has been created where Terence Woodgate develops his work as a designer, integrating the professional dimension into the everyday life of the house.

A self-sufficient house

Mas Cadalt is also a home deeply connected to its territory. The house operates in a self-sufficient way in terms of energy and water, thanks to the installation of photovoltaic panels with batteries and a system of cisterns designed specifically for the estate. One of them has been transformed into a small pool for cooling off during the summer.

The agricultural landscape surrounding the farmhouse—almost 68 hectares of land—also contributes to the self-sufficiency of its inhabitants, producing enough food to meet their needs. The house thus becomes part of a way of life that restores a direct relationship between architecture, landscape, and production. 

Restoring a way of inhabiting

Ultimately, the project seems to respond to a quiet attitude towards architecture. As in the most refined creative processes, the aim is to allow the building to regain its balance. Mas Cadalt is developed through the natural act of repairing what has deteriorated and adding only what was missing. The architecture, almost invisible, allows the place to speak for itself once again.

In Mas Cadalt, architecture advances with the same discretion as the surrounding landscape. The intervention by Fran Silvestre Arquitectos seeks to restore the balance between matter, space, and territory that was already latent in its original construction.

This attitude recalls a certain tradition of Iberian architecture—found in the work of Álvaro Siza or Eduardo Souto de Moura—where intervening in the existing means, above all, deeply understanding the place. It is not about erasing the past or reproducing it literally, but about allowing its history to continue from the present.

In Girona, among forests and cultivated fields, the former farmhouse becomes once again part of the landscape. Architecture limits itself to recomposing what is necessary, adding with precision what was missing. And in that restrained, almost silent gesture, an essential idea emerges: that restoring a building can also be a way of restoring a way of inhabiting the world.

Project: Mas Cadalt.

Location: Canet d’Adri (Girona).

Built area: 385 m².
Site area: 675.746 m².
Completion: 2025.
Architecture: Fran Silvestre Arquitectos.
Project team: Fran Silvestre, arquitecto de proyecto, María Masià, arquitecta colaboradora, Susana León, arquitecta colaboradora.
Interior design: Alfaro Hofmann.
Client: Terence Woodgate y Paula Woodgate.
Technical architect: Xavier Baldrich.
Structures: Windmill Structural Consultants.
Contractor: Construccions Costa Burch.
Business developer: Néstor Bolinches.
Photography: Fernando Guerra.
Video: Jesús Orrico.
Source: Fran Silvestre Arquitectos.

Fran Silvestre

Born in Valencia in 1976, Fran Silvestre has established himself as one of the most recognized figures in contemporary Spanish architecture. Architect, designer, and professor, his career brings together professional practice, research, and teaching—three fields that, in his case, form part of a unified way of understanding architecture as an exercise in precision, sensitivity, and constant reflection.

He studied at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Valencia, where he graduated with honors. During his formative years, a decisive encounter shaped his intellectual development: his collaboration with Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, one of the most influential figures in European architecture. Working alongside Siza allowed him to engage with an approach to design grounded in conceptual clarity, constructive rigor, and a deep attention to the relationship between architecture, place, and human experience.

From that period emerged an affinity that has profoundly shaped his architectural thinking. More than a formal influence, his relationship with the Portuguese master translates into a disciplinary attitude: the pursuit of an essential architecture, refined to achieve a serene beauty in which every decision responds to a spatial, technical, and constructive logic.

Silvestre later expanded his education with studies in urbanism at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in the Netherlands and obtained his PhD from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. Throughout his career, he has also maintained a strong academic activity. He has served as a design studio professor at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia and directs the postgraduate program MArch Architecture and Design, an academic platform that brings together internationally renowned architects and explores new ways of thinking about contemporary architecture.

Fran Silvestre Arquitectos

Fran Silvestre Arquitectos was founded in Valencia in 2005. Since then, it has grown into an architecture and design practice with a strong international presence. The team is composed of architects, designers, and engineers who collaborate in an integrated manner across projects of varying scales and programs.

From its headquarters in Valencia, the studio develops residential, cultural, and corporate projects in numerous countries. Its architecture is distinguished by a notable formal clarity and a constant exploration of geometry, light, and materiality. Precise volumes, silent spaces, and a carefully considered relationship with the landscape define a body of work that seeks a synthesis between technological innovation and spatial serenity.

The studio’s practice revolves around an idea that Silvestre himself has defined as “effective beauty”: an architecture capable of uniting constructive rigor, structural thinking, and aesthetic sensitivity. This approach is supported by a multidisciplinary working process in which specialists in structures, building systems, and industrial design collaborate from the earliest stages of each project.

The studio’s headquarters also occupies a site of strong cultural significance: the former workshop of sculptor Andreu Alfaro. Today, this space functions not only as an architecture office but also as a place for research, teaching, and exchange among architects of different generations.

Over the past two decades, Fran Silvestre Arquitectos has developed a body of work that has been widely published and internationally recognized. Its projects—characterized by geometric precision, a refined use of materials, and an architecture that engages with the landscape through a sense of calm—have positioned the studio among the Spanish practices with the greatest global presence.

Designed under a slow philosophy — the same that accompanies the designer’s personal and professional life — the house was conceived to create a place where time expands and the boundaries between disciplines dissolve. It is not a permanently inhabited dwelling, but it is deeply lived. A house that, as Susanna Cots and Alex Juvé explain, discovered them: “houses find you, and we were waiting for it.” A space that gathers the essence of their studio, where they share their perception of beauty, nature and emotion.

A discovery that reshaped the project

The intervention began with an 18th-century house in a state of ruin. During construction, an unexpected discovery reformulated the meaning of the project: after removing successive construction layers, a fragment of Peratallada’s medieval wall — built between the 12th and 13th centuries — emerged, crossing the interior of the house. The finding was integrated as a presence that reorganises the spatial narrative. The wall, now visible in the boutique area, becomes the historical and symbolic anchor of the house. From that moment on, the project took a more ambitious direction: to preserve, share and activate a place that already contained centuries of memory.

A house conceived to be shared

The Eleven House unfolds across three floors and 140 m², complemented by an outdoor area of 100 m². The layout responds less to conventional domestic logic than to a sequence of uses linked to encounter. The entrance space, opening directly onto carrer Major, has been transformed into a small design boutique. Here, objects for the home, personal care pieces, books and artworks coexist alongside collections designed by Susanna Cots herself. The space rests on the stone walls recovered during the restoration, where original materiality acts as a silent backdrop.

On the first floor, the house adopts a more domestic approach. A fully equipped kitchen allows for gatherings, meals or presentations. The Solitaire piece by bulthaup takes centre stage and also serves as a display for the Onze ceramic collection, designed by the interior designer and produced in the Empordà. Next to the kitchen, a dining area with a table for eleven guests and a living room with a fireplace form a continuous space conceived for conversation and pause.

Between everyday life and shared experience

The house is conceived as a place full of life: workshops, gatherings, creative sessions and private celebrations form part of its usual programme. The architecture offers a flexible framework where different ways of inhabiting can unfold.

The upper floor hosts the most versatile space in the house. Here, practices linked to wellbeing take place, such as meditation or yoga sessions, accompanied by small domestic rituals — breakfasts, shared pauses — that reinforce the intimate dimension of the place. But it is also where the house opens to its most public side: the art gallery.

A gallery as a natural extension of the house

The Eleven Gallery emerges as a natural extension of the project, where art and everyday life coexist effortlessly. The exhibitions, constantly evolving, activate the upper floor as a place for observation and encounter, maintaining the intimate scale that defines the entire house. Artists exhibited include Jimmy Millán, Pati Baztán, Cristina Blanch, Cécile Bercovici, Anna Carmona, Sara N. Bergman, Beatriz Montero, Mireia Abras, Tània Font and Conrad Roset, among others.

This hybrid condition — between home, creative refuge and cultural space — defines the project’s singularity. The house remains open and available to different readings and uses.

The exterior as a space of continuity

At the rear, a garden of approximately 100 m² extends the experience outdoors. Here, the furniture is by Calma, designed by Inma Bermúdez with the complicity of Andreu Carulla. A small shed next to the secondary entrance structures this area, which serves as a setting for workshops, intimate concerts, wine tastings or breakfasts after yoga sessions. Rather than an ornamental garden, it is a space of continuity: a natural extension of the house where time is perceived differently and where collective activity acquires a more sensory dimension.

A house as a quiet manifesto

The Eleven House is, in essence, a built manifesto, grounded in the coherence between intention and form. The recovery of a historical structure, attention to human scale and the will to share shape a project that moves between the domestic and the cultural. In this sense, the house condenses many of the constants in Susanna Cots’ work: the search for calm, the construction of contained atmospheres and an understanding of interior design as a discipline capable of structuring experiences. Here, however, that gaze becomes more direct, more autobiographical.

The Eleven House is a place of quiet intensity, where architecture, memory and everyday life intertwine naturally. A house not permanently inhabited, yet always open as a shared space — a territory of encounters and a vital synthesis of a trajectory.

Project: The Eleven House.
Location: Peratallada, Empordà (Girona)
Completed: 2019
Surface: 140 m2 + 100 m2 jardín
Author: Susanna Cots Interior Design.
Photography: Mauricio Fuertes.
Kitchen: diseño Susanna Cots y Solitaire de Bulthaup.
Furniture: Mesa y sillas de Dareels. Butacas Norr11. Mobiliario exterior Calma Outdoor.
Flooring: Matimex.
Lighting: Cronek, diseño de Susanna Cots, para iluminación jardín; Simon y Maison de Vacances (lámparas comedor).

Susanna Cots

Few interior designers in Spain have developed such a distinctive and coherent language as Susanna Cots. Her work—shaped by a deep connection to nature and emotional wellbeing—unfolds from her studio in the serene landscape of the Empordà region, infusing each project with a sense of clarity, balance and quiet beauty. Her approach has garnered recognition both nationally and internationally for its aesthetic sensitivity and conceptual depth.  View full biography.