Llerona, a former garage turned guest apartment in Torre Baró, Barcelona

Torre Baró sits on the steep slopes of the Collserola hills on Barcelona's edge, a neighbourhood shaped largely by self-built houses. Here, the local studio lablanca, led by Jordi Ribas and Mònica Piqué, has turned an old garage into a guest apartment annexed to the main house. The shell was far from tidy: a trapezoidal main room joined to a long, double-height volume, all dug into the hillside.

Rather than fight the awkward bits, the architects built around them. A concrete foundation block that rises above the floor now carries a lightweight kitchen, and a damp recess in the earth-retaining back wall holds the bathroom, so the wet rooms sit against the buried edge. That central core squeezes the route through, separating the living space from a top-lit sleeping area in the tall volume.

Damp shaped the materials too. The bed base, storage benches, partitions and bathroom enclosure are all made from bare, breathable concrete blocks, while small, saturated red porcelain tiles wrap the kitchen plinth and the rear recess, picking up colours from the house next door. The small tiles cope neatly with the room's odd angles.

This is a private guest annex shared through designboom's reader submissions, so there's nothing to visit. It's a satisfying read for anyone weighing up a tricky conversion of their own.

Our summary of a story from designboom, published 3 November 2026. Read the original

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