Co-Working Office in Barcelona, Spain by APPAREIL

Unlike some of the more hipster versions of co-working spaces you’re likely to encounter, this one comes without the fake grass and overstuffed beanbags. There’s a distinct lack of ‘café lifestyle’ about it. Neither are there any ‘funky’ pendant lights dotted around the place to make you feel you’ve just turned up at your local cool wine bar. You’ll find none of that sort of nonsense at this place.

Designed by the architects APPAREIL, this Barcelona based co-working office is anything but over worked. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Clean lines and perfect detailing are the only accoutrements to what is essentially a free flowing, unencumbered space. Sparse but in all the right ways, this converted warehouse is on the top floor of a building in Poblenou, the city’s former industrial quarter. But it doesn’t yell industrial with exposed rafters and acres of concrete. It softly whispers calm and subtle with it’s beautifully crafted cabinetry and the deployment of sophisticated restraint.

A simple design, a rectangular open space, it incorporates two intricate, milled-timber, multifunctional walls, which contain all the necessary equipment and working solutions for a multidisciplinary group of people to collectively work together. The space is designed to evolve on a daily basis depending on the activities and functions that go on there. One wall has ability to integrate furniture to host temporary working locations for the designers, architects and entrepreneurs. Long floating tables are perfect for model making, drawing or just tapping away at your laptop. The kitchen and bathroom are located on the perimeter of the warehouse, both simply designed, in character with the rest of space. There’s a winter garden too that faces the sea.

The space was specifically designed to be open plan and unencumbered, so that artist and architect could work alongside each other, sharing, collaborating, and creating a melting pot of ideas. The transparency of the floor layout resonates with the idea behind the transparency of the interactions between the professional disciplines that work there.

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