Architecture studio Narch has renovated a Barcelona apartment, removing many of the internal walls to create a single space with a variety of patterned tile floors (+ slideshow).

The historic apartment is located in the Eixample district of Barcelona, and features a number of decorative floors dating back to the early 20th century.
Narch was asked to transform the 65-square-metre home to create a space large enough to host family events. To achieve this, the designers removed most the internal walls, creating a more straightforward open-plan layout.

But removing these partitions also had another effect ? the tiled floors, which previously had been confined to separate rooms, now appear alongside one another in a single eclectic composition. These tiles, known as encaustic tiles, are traditional in Barcelona. They are made by pouring differently pigmented ceramics into a mould, before pressing them to create a pattern that goes right through.
The team sourced extra floor tiles from the same period to fill in any openings.

"We used all the existing mosaics that we could ? pulling up all the floor tiles, cleaning them and putting them back again ? but the original kitchen and bathroom have non-original mosaics," the Barcelona studio told Dezeen.
"We went to a messy antiques shop and bought other mosaics from the beginning of the 20th century, which we put into our little bathroom and kitchen area," they continued.

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