At the heart of Riera lies a single architectural object. Designed by lablanca, the apartment replaces conventional room-by-room organisation with a continuous U-shaped furniture element that accommodates storage, services and circulation while liberating the surrounding space for everyday life to unfold. The result is an interior where architecture and furniture merge into one cohesive system, defined by soft curves, integrated craftsmanship and a luminous palette of white and sunflower yellow.
In Badalona, the coastal Catalan city that forms part of Barcelona’s metropolitan fabric, amidst the late nineteenth-century bourgeois townhouses that testify to its industrial past, lablanca transforms a conventional mid-century apartment into a carefully choreographed domestic landscape.
Set within a 1960s residential building on Riera d’en Matamoros—a historic street where the city’s transition from a Roman and fishing settlement to an industrial bourgeois centre remains inscribed in its layered urban fabric—the 90-square-metre renovation replaces cellular compartmentalisation with a spatial strategy orchestrated around a single architectural gesture.
Rather than relying on walls to organise the plan, the project is structured around a U-shaped built-in furniture element that consolidates storage, wet areas and domestic services into a continuous architectural core.
More than cabinetry, this inhabitable volume becomes the apartment’s primary organising device, simultaneously defining rooms, directing movement and establishing a clear distinction between the day and night zones according to solar orientation. By concentrating the programme within this compact element, the perimeter is liberated, allowing the living spaces to unfold with greater openness, flexibility and access to natural light.
Its presence is expressed through an understated yet highly recognisable material language. A restrained palette of white surfaces and sunflower-yellow interiors transforms the core into a luminous domestic landmark, while soft radiused corners, flush cabinetry, integrated handles and continuous plywood edges dissolve the distinction between furniture and architecture. The resulting object reads as both infrastructure and inhabitable landscape, introducing warmth and tactility without compromising the project’s formal clarity.
The apartment’s elongated floor plan, interrupted by a central courtyard, is embraced rather than concealed. A continuous sequence of spaces unfolds alongside the architectural core, where subtle shifts in thickness accommodate different functions while generating moments of compression and release. Curved openings, rounded ceilings and recessed niches soften the linear geometry, lending the interiors a quiet sense of fluidity that contrasts with the rational organisation of the plan.
Throughout the project, architecture is reduced to its essential elements—light, colour, proportion and carefully crafted joinery. Rather than introducing complexity, Riera demonstrates how a single, precisely conceived intervention can redefine domestic life, transforming an ordinary mid-century apartment into a coherent, calm and spatially generous home.
Facts & Credits
Project title Riera
Typology Interior Design, Apartment Renovation, Residential
Location Riera de Matamoros, Badalona, Catalonia, Spain
Area 90 m2
Status Completed, 2026
Architecture lablanca
Lead Architects Jordi Ribas, Mònica Piqué
Photography Simone Marcolin