At 28 years old, Bárbara Aurell asked herself some questions: how she wanted to live, what life she wanted to have and what she wanted to do in the mornings. “I had just worked for ten years in a wonderful office, with a wonderful boss, a beautiful job and suddenly I wanted to fly.” She had just bought the apartment she now lives in in the heart of the Gràcia neighborhood (Barcelona). “I decided that mid-morning I wanted to go to the square to have a coffee, meet interesting people and set up exhibitions for artists.” She wrote down and developed her wish list in several notebooks that she still keeps and rereads from time to time. And the way she approaches her home renovation has made it possible for her to fulfill them.
He came across this 75 square meter ground floor with a backyard by chance. He was looking for a high floor, but he slipped through a half-open door and went in to take a look. He found himself in a real ruin. “There was no ground, everything was dirt, there was nothing… just a toilet and a tap outside,” but in the background a tree could be seen. He fell in love with the patio. It was a straight shot to the heart.
In the notebook he outlined how he wanted his home to be. “For me – she explains – it was super important to have a very spacious living room, I really like to cook and I wanted to do it surrounded by my friends, to be very participatory. “I believe in spaces that are united by a line.” And the union of his house, of the front and back façades, is the white lacquered kitchen, which later becomes closets and ends in a library staircase, with art and photography books and architecture magazines, which goes up to the bedroom. .
At the same time as he was setting up the house, he installed his studio, Espacio en Blanco, under the window that faces the front façade of this ground floor. “The table, which is made of iron, receives wonderful light in the morning.” There she spent hours waiting for her first assignments as a freelancer, listening to bossa nova, the music she discovered at the age of 20 in a record store when she lived in London. With a mother from San Sebastián and a father from Terrassa, she is convinced – she jokes – that at some point she was Brazilian, a country in which she feels at home and which she visited for the first time a few months ago.
Bárbara Aurell enjoys her home depending on the time of day. In the mornings she likes to stretch out on the patio. In the afternoons, read on the chaise longue listening to bossa nova, indie music and opera. When she needs a lot of concentration, she still works in front of the window. “And I sit on the floor a lot, especially when friends come over, leaning on the wooden platform and on this Ailanto rug, which is very tasty.”
That first place where Aurell worked when she created her firm at the age of 30 remains the same sixteen years later, although the interior designer later opened a studio a few meters from her home. At the same time, she opened her domestic doors once a month to a guest artist to do whatever she wanted, with absolute creative freedom. “I really like art and I had this concern about having access to artists and that they have access to the public.” Aurell baptized her evening as the White Movement. “The artist is the one who decides if he wants to sell or not, and I don’t ask for a commission… When there is no money involved, a different dialogue arises, the artist is very relaxed explaining his work and people dare to ask questions. .. Actually, he seems disinterested, but he is not; He enriches me a lot and improves me as a person, as a creative. It is a shot of inspiration.”
He has already had almost a hundred exhibitions. Of course, after the pandemic he organizes them in his studio and, instead of lasting one night, they now last a whole month. “Before it was a little crazy because the day after a Blank Movement, I would pick up everything and put my house back together.”
Between his house and his studio, Aurell has a good collection of contemporary art, with all the artists to whom he has opened his walls and others that he has discovered at fairs or galleries. “When you get hung up on a painting it’s like when you get hung up on a man. Suddenly you see a work and it gets inside you and you can’t get it out. But you don’t buy right away, you keep walking, you get into bed and it keeps haunting you. So I tell myself, come on, this year I’m not buying an expensive sweater, I’m buying a painting. Although it is not the price, it is the work that calls you, for me it has a heart value because I am moved a lot by that feeling.”
He feels a special inclination for works on paper, “I suppose because of my work,” he explains. Artists such as Paula Bonet, Bruno Ollé, Mikel Belascoain and Mirthe Blussé have passed through its walls. It shows the interior of her house drawn by Bea Sarrias; a photo of Australia that a good friend gave her, a diptych by Regina Jiménez and the subtle bamboo sculpture that her boyfriend gave her, made by Laurent Martin Lo: “When the air comes in from the patio it sways and tinkles, it is something magical ”.
The art coexists with other objects with memory, such as the red sofa, which she found in a fabric store on sale. He also came across Marcel Breuer’s Chesca chairs from different eras at auction houses. They cover the large wooden table in the kitchen-dining room that she designed herself with wood for formwork and capable of withstanding a good tap if she chooses.
“When people think of an interior designer’s house, they often imagine everything modern, new, impeccable, but I always look for that moment of legacy.” She has always been accompanied by “some silver coffee spoons, that flamenco painting, which belonged to my grandmother; the chaise longe, which is also antique, or the porcelain cups that I bought at the Portobello market.” She also believes that “in houses you have to leave space for things to happen, not everything should be finished off and closed. I always tell clients that it’s like when you go on a trip and you leave something to see to come back. You always have to leave room for things to happen.”
