This house in Banyoles, sensitively rehabilitated by Estudi Maite Prats, holds fast to a way of living

Banyoles is a small city on the Pla de l’Estany region, near Girona, distinguished by a legendary lake that precedes and defines it. The estany, as its residents call it, is one of the most singular wetlands on the Iberian Peninsula. Of karstic origin, fed by underground springs that rise from the depths with an almost geological constancy, its waters hold a temperature and colour entirely their own, shifting with the season and the hour. It is a landscape that teaches the eye to slow down..

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.

Project by Estudi Maite Prats