House at Palau entrance

Engel & Völkers presents, exclusively, “Casa Luján”. Designed in the 1960s by the group of architects Oriol Bohigas, Josep M. Martorell and David Mackay, and conceived as a country house and workshop, it is located at the entrance to the town, with direct access to the main road—Avinguda Catalunya—and completely free of immediately adjacent buildings. It is a sober, austere construction that leaves its concrete and handcrafted brick structure fully exposed. It is arranged in two rectangular volumes, one at each end, covered by two distinctive in-situ concrete vaults over exposed brick walls. Both are connected, on the upper floor, by a “waist” that currently houses a small kitchen and the main entrance door. At one end there are three bedrooms and a bathroom; at the other, the living-dining room with a large picture window. The ground floor contains the garage and a large, almost open-plan space currently unused, the former workshop. Both floors still remain independent, with no internal connection via stairs. An access ramp to the upper floor draws a diagonal across the house’s profile and, finally, returns to the horizontal plane to form a spacious terrace. Beneath this same terrace, a porch is created for the ground floor. The garden surrounds the house, with a narrower passage corresponding to the garage entrance and three clearly differentiated areas: a courtyard slightly sunken below street level, in the shade of a linden tree; a transitional strip with vegetation running parallel to the ramp and leading to the porch; and an open, sunny flat area, from whose farthest ends we can step back from the ensemble formed by cubic, triangular and arch-shaped elements. “Casa Luján” lends itself to considering different solutions for redistributing spaces and creating distinct areas. The upper floor currently maintains a very marked separation between the day area and the night area, but if the lower floor and the garage came into play, the division could perhaps take a more vertical direction, bringing, for example, the living-dining room closer to the garden’s most open area. This is not a house that comes “ready-made”; it must be rethought and time and effort invested in it in order, ultimately, to find the key.