In Barcelona, a House That Was Remade by Taking It Apart

Though Santomà is an architect by training and has worked at well-known Spanish firms including Pich and Rafael Moneo, his house’s renovations were done after a long stay in the remote Andaman Islands and, in that anti-bourgeois frame of mind, entirely improvised. “In place of an architectural plan, we had a team of five guys who had only very basic notions of construction,” he says. What they mainly did was tear down walls to open up rooms, inventively gouging the original mass. The staircase, for instance, has evolved into a new one with a hole in the living room wall that once enclosed it, which allows light to fall through to the downstairs space from three floors above; from the vantage point of the living room’s built-in couch, it resembles a light installation. There is no barrier or railing, and when I worry, reflexively, about Jan falling through the opening, Santomà laughs and says the little boy is accustomed to the house, and that he’d only land on the soft green sofas below anyway.

Casa Horta’s geometric oddities reverberate throughout. As you ascend the stairs, the walls and ceilings blend into overlapping curves. The entire ground-floor garden is a jungle — an unruly confusion — that leads to a swimming pool no larger than four average-size bathtubs, built out from the back wall. The structure’s strange configuration makes it appear more sculptural than architectural, and so, too, does Santomà’s vast and eclectic collection of iconic European design objects from the last century: a giant foam foot in the hallway by the Italian artist Gaetano Pesce, along with one of his butterfly-like Nobody’s Perfect chairs in the office, which sits near a wiry Parentesi floor lamp by the Italian designers Achille Castiglioni and Pio Manzù. The juxtapositions of these pieces make the place feel at once deliberate and disobedient.

Because most homes in Barcelona are apartments, Santomà wanted to preserve Casa Horta’s identity as a house by maintaining its verticality. The ground floor’s pink mosaic shower, near the kitchen, is a double-height, 23-foot column without a ceiling. It’s an unnerving cross between a cylinder, a prism and a cell: Anyone walking past the shower area on the floor above — emerging from the staircase, for instance — can spy on whoever’s bathing within it. Likewise, the ceiling above the ground-floor living room is not quite a ceiling but an open metal grid, painted in the same deep green as the walls; the caging forms the floor of Santomà’s second-floor guest quarters, with a mattress on the ground that seems to hover in space. On the next story is the couple’s bedroom — again, a mattress surrounded by light — and a roof terrace, which is all white, spartan, hot and void of greenery, with a view of the street below.

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