Before the renovation, this 1930s apartment in Barcelona’s Gràcia neighborhood was divided and fragmented. Small rooms blocked the natural light and hid the original Catalan vaults behind dropped ceilings. The kitchen, tucked away at the back, was completely cut off from the social life of the home.

Rather than simply knocking down walls to make its 70 m² (about 750 sq ft) feel larger, interior design studio CA-N reorganized the apartment around a freestanding volume in okoumé wood that holds the kitchen and orders the way you move through the space. This central piece of joinery deliberately stops short of the ceiling, preserving the sense of height and letting light travel from one end to the other.

The material palette is restrained and tactile: okoumé, terrazzo, brushed stainless steel, Macael marble, carpet. Each element plays a part in organizing the space. The terrazzo marks shifts in the geometry of the floor plan, while a continuous stainless steel countertop runs from the kitchen into the living area, where it becomes the top of a low storage unit. Proportion, alignments, and varying degrees of privacy all grew out of daily routines, so that the way of living becomes part of the design itself.

In this balance between contemporary precision and the historic weight of the building, lighting is treated as one more layer of the architecture. Freestanding lamps and wall lights on two-way switches bring the light down to a lower, more intimate height.

Where the kitchen gives way to the living room, the TMC floor lamp, designed by Miguel Milá in 1961, draws its spare metal silhouette beside the wood. In the warmth of the bedroom, beneath the restored vault, Pete Sans’s Lamparaprima (1979) sits at the height of the okoumé headboard, a poetic, witty reading light above the nightstand.

“These lamps aren’t just light fixtures. They’re objects, almost like small works of art within the home. Both had their place planned from the moment we designed the apartment, because we wanted them to be part of the interior, not a last-minute decision,” explains Xavi Goñi, founder of CA-N. “There’s also a very clear relationship between materials: steel plays a major role, as it does in these two lamps. The Lamparaprima on the wooden wall created contrast, and we loved its lightness and delicacy. The TMC, with its verticality, fit perfectly into that wooden column. They’re like two steel sculptures on wood.”

A subtle gesture that lives alongside the materials and their simplicity, making architecture a closer, more livable place.