Gava Beach House: A Barcelona Home Shaped by Sea Views
Gava Beach House transforms a former office in Barcelona, Spain, into a house for a couple, designed by Roman Izquierdo Bouldstridge. Set against views of Gava Mar Beach filtered through pine trunks, the 2022 project turns horizontality into an interior idea through shifting floor levels, a mezzanine, and an open plan that draws natural light deep into the home.
About Gava Beach House
This project converts a former office into a house for a couple. The interior looks out toward Gava Mar Beach, where pine trunks partially frame the sea and turn the view into an image in constant change. From that condition, the project develops the idea of a natural interior landscape in dialogue with its surroundings.
The horizon between sky and sea becomes the central reference. Echoing the sensitive duality found in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes, the house translates that horizontal condition into a sequence of levels and sightlines. Rather than treating the floor as a single plane, the project builds a series of interior horizons that shape how the home is occupied and seen.
Levels:
The layout is organized as an open plan that allows natural light to reach the full depth of the dwelling. One of the main challenges was to make the landscape present from every room, with the bathroom as the only enclosed exception. Changes in floor level and height work as nearly invisible boundaries, defining the different areas without breaking their continuity.
That approach also gives the house a flexible character, allowing uses to shift over time according to the needs of its inhabitants. At the same time, it increases the sense of amplitude and draws attention to the nearly 5-meter-high (16.4-foot-high) ceilings. From the entrance, a long view extends through the house toward the sea.
A sculptural stair leads to a new mezzanine arranged on two levels, housing the study and the bedroom. A third horizontal plane is suspended between the two perimeter walls, forming a long table that also serves as a guard above the lower floor. A few steps down from the entrance, the kitchen and dining area sit under a lower ceiling, compressing the volume. Closer to the sea, the house opens up again, and the living room becomes a double-height interior garden that extends the small balcony into a bright, planted setting.
Materiality:
Two construction strategies give the project a unified language and a distinct identity. The first maximizes light by painting the floor and concrete block walls white. The second emphasizes the horizontal planes: cross-laminated fir timber beams and tongue-and-groove boards stand out against the abstract clarity of the new interior.
The material choices respond both to aesthetic aims and to the intention of making the intervention sustainable. Light, structure, and finish are handled as part of the same spatial argument, rather than as separate layers.
Nature:
An interior garden extends the vegetation of the beach into the house and creates a natural atmosphere indoors. Climbing plants trace a vertical path of green through the empty volume, introducing movement against the strong horizontal order of the project. The result sets living and dead matter in dialogue: the irregular lines of pine trunks outside meet the fir beams that once formed tree trunks themselves.
Between the organic and the abstract, the interior softens the boundary between inside and outside. Light plays a changing role throughout this landscape, bringing calm, imperfection, and a sense of time into the daily life of the house.
Photography by Adrià Goula
Visit Roman Izquierdo Bouldstridge
