It’s hard to describe how peaceful Girona is. The rambling Spanish province connects the mountains of Andorra in the west to the Costa Brava seashore along the Mediterranean. Just a short drive from Barcelona, Girona is a popular weekend escape, but it has plenty of quiet spots without crowds. In some villages, you’ll see homes with more balconies than people. And on one of these balconies, you might find Miguel Lorán and Isabel Campos.

For Miguel and Isabel, Girona is where their lives come together. The couple, both lawyers, first met at work in 2002, but they didn’t get together romantically right away. For years, their lives ran on parallel tracks: Miguel in Barcelona and Isabel in Madrid, both married to other people. It was only in 2019 that they reconnected at a concert when a mutual friend reintroduced them, and the couple soon started their life together.

The couple recently decided to renovate the Girona holiday home Miguel bought in 2005. The simple, gabled house with a red-tile roof was in great condition. Built in the early 2000s, it had everything they needed: a kitchen and living room on the ground floor and four bedrooms upstairs—enough for their adult children if they came to visit—but it was smaller than they wanted. Plus, the home was done in a generic, modern style, and Miguel wanted it to feel more distinct and in tune with its context. In 2016, he entrusted his Barcelona apartment to Anna and Eugeni Bach, a Finnish-Spanish duo who run an eponymous architecture studio. They made it feel like a personal paradise. As Miguel and Isabel began spending more time at the holiday home, they yearned for a similar sense of peace.

The architects were excited to work with Miguel again. “It’s a really beautiful relationship for us,” Anna says. She compares it to being a family doctor: There’s no imposing a way to live but rather observing the client to figure out how they can improve their life.

The Bachs expanded the home, adding a few rooms, including a new primary bedroom, and adjusted the interior layout, but some of the biggest changes are outside. Miguel and Isabel prefer to spend their time outdoors, so the Bachs reimagined the house’s exterior as the heart of the home and the interior as a space for privacy and calm. The architects added a long balcony to create a terrace that runs along the south-facing upstairs bedrooms, with disc-shaped metal shades to protect against the sun. The terrace itself doubles as an awning to protect the downstairs patio, where the couple enjoy most meals, often with friends. The Bachs relied on basic geometric shapes to keep the designs clean but striking. On one side of the terrace, they installed a circular pergola and round table so the family could cook and eat next to a new triangular outdoor grill. The terrace also covers a corner of the pool, making the perfect place for Miguel to dip his feet into the water while enjoying a book in the shade.

“The color of the exterior of the house was carefully mixed on-site to match the color of the natural stone and overall atmosphere of the village.”
—Miguel Lorán, resident

Inside, Miguel’s passion for books inspired the new triangular atrium, which brightens the new downstairs library by cutting through its ceiling and into the primary bedroom so that light from the window upstairs can stream below. Windows in the bedroom look into the atrium and onto the uppermost bookshelves over petite reading desks. It’s a remarkably compact set of contrasts. From the lower level, the bookshelves rise to the heavens, but from the upper story, the space feels cozy and intimate.

These details make the space feel tailor made for Miguel and Isabel, but other choices nod to the surrounding village’s medieval history. The designers color-matched the creamy exterior plaster to the stonework in the local village and designed the terrace handrails to echo the laid-brick patterns of nearby houses.

With construction complete, Miguel and Isabel still make time to see the Bachs frequently—Eugeni’s family has a home in a nearby village, and the couples have a close bond. Anna knows why. “Building anything is a traumatic process,” she says. “It’s terrible somehow. You get everything torn down, and then everything is costly, not only time-wise, but nerve-wise. To have this feeling of being a team and having trust—it doesn’t always happen.” And when it does? A taste of peace.

Project Credits:

Architect: Anna Bach and Eugeni Bach

Builder: Construccions J. Pallàs SL

Structural Engineering: Masala Consultors

Interior Design: Anna Bach and Eugeni Bach

Landscape Design: Anna Bach and Eugeni Bach

Carpentry: Fusteria Isern

Quantity Surveying: Alfons Brugué

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Circular Additions and a Triangular Atrium Turn a Generic Spanish Home Into a Personal Paradise