BUC Arquitectura
Living in a former grocery store
Restoring an old corner shop in the centre of Campos and turning it into a house while maintaining the building’s character from a bygone age: the architecture studio Buc met this challenge with a premise: conserving as many elements as possible of the old building, and preserving its soul.
text César Mateu Moyà
photography Neus Pastor
The first decision the architects made when undertaking the project was to remove the interior walls, opening up an extremely large visible space. “Around 50 or 60 years ago the tendency was to add on and on, to have lots of small rooms for storing things. We removed them and were left with the original space. We even discovered a wall made of adobe, an Arab building technique using compacted damp earth”, says Ramón Juan, the founder of Buc. The old grocery store in the centre of Campos, which once fed the inhabitants of the village, had a very discrete façade. “From the outset we wanted the most important elements to be the vaulted ceilings, the hydraulic tile flooring and the courtyard. We tried to showcase the house as an example of traditional architecture, just as it was, with no additional layers concealing it”.
For this architect, renovating a building is more complex than building one from scratch. “When you have an empty building lot you have three conditioning factors: regulations, the climate and the customers. But with a renovation, as well as these factors, there is also the determining factor of the house itself. You have to think of more creative solutions to ensure the customer is satisfied and the building does not suffer so much”. One of the main changes [...]
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