The interior designer Marta Vilallonga looks up at the façade of 4 Juan Sebastián Bach Street, in Barcelona, and admires the unusual contemporary gargoyles that punctuate it. We are facing an icon of Barcelona architecture from the 60s designed by a very young Ricardo Bofill, just turned 20, who already showed architectural genius. Marta Vilallonga lives today in the attic that crowns the property, with chimneys in homage to Gaudí and a beautiful panoramic view of the Collserola mountain range. On the ground floor, the original display case from the period, reminiscent of the Vienna Secession, marks the entrance to her interior design studio.
It is an atypical chamfered building, in the Bonanova neighborhood, as it was designed at the time with two entrances. The first gave access to 21 social limited-income homes, and the second, to 12 bourgeois homes, where the virtuosity of the work with craftsmen of iron, brass, leather or brick still dazzles today. Marta Vilallonga would later meet Ricardo Bofill and become his collaborator and partner for the last 30 years of her life. The duplex that tops the building and was shared by both, was renovated by her in 2017, maintaining the essence of the project, but adding her imprint.
Marta Vilallonga was made into an interior designer by a heterogeneous accumulation of experiences and circumstances. She grew up in an artistic and bohemian environment between Cadaqués and Montreal, daughter of a Catalan painter and Canadian mother, she remembers that at the age of three she was already chasing her father with a mini-cart along the scaffolding of the Cadaqués house under construction. And the fervor of the ’67 World’s Fair in Montreal, “especially Buckminster Fuller’s Spherical Pavilion and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 building, where a friend of mine lived, were a total revelation to me.” The chance encounter of a photograph of a stage by Adolphe Appia, with an amalgamation of imposing stairs, led him to study a year of scenography in Barcelona. A regular at the film library, she considers Bergman and Welles to be her initiators of spatial language.
In the 1980s he worked in New York in the office of Richard Meier. “There I was impregnated by white. “It is the color that really lets you see the shapes,” she observes. When she renovated the attic she now lives in five years ago, this color gained presence with its ability to summon calm and spatiality. The new white marble floors with brass joints take up the resource that Bofill already used in the entrance hall of the bourgeois property. Framed in a continuous bone-tone microcement pavement, she has extended it to the exterior terraces. The semi-matte lime stucco walls complete the envelope. She has chosen veined white marble, selected from a quarry in Italy, for the set of tables in the house: living room, dining room and office, as a subtle counterpoint.
Light is one of the treasures of the place, which Ricardo Bofill worked on conscientiously. As he evolves throughout the day, he creates suggestive changing games. “For me, light is almost everything,” says Vilallonga. He also highlights architecture that invites us to establish habits and rituals in people’s lives. “From taking off your shoes when entering a house, to sitting and watching how the lights and shadows pass through a wall. And stay in a state of contemplation.”
The word aesthetics – from the Greek aisthesis, which in its literal translation means sensation – fits perfectly with the Vilallonga-Bofill universe. She reconfirms this when she comments: “Ricardo was a devourer of sensations with exceptional mental activity.” The work and predilections of this interior designer have also been guided by them. Among her personal places of worship is the Kiyomizu-dera temple in Kyoto, which introduced her to restraint and sobriety, both in intention and in outline.
“Especially its wooden structure on which it rests, where you can admire the secular art of assembly.” The Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy, with its shell shape and red brick pavement, is another. Or the innovative Walden 7 by Bofill, from 1975. Before it was built, Marta’s father already bought two modules off plan. “I remember being amazed by the interior space of the building and its striking color range. Every time I fly through its corridors I discover new geometries and incredible new names in its corridors: Neruda, La Pasionaria, Groucho Marx and hundreds more.”
Although perhaps for her the most beautiful space in the world is the Sahara desert. “It is the largest space I have ever known and to which Ricardo introduced me. The desert is total silence. Aesthetics of the purity of the landscape. A dune can be 25 kilometers long, a perfect edge detailed against the indigo of the sky and the ocher of the sand. Aesthetics at a high point.” At her house, Marta invites me to change chairs as we begin to chat in the kitchen office, an intimate place of sober sophistication. She suggests that I sit where Ricardo Bofill did so that she can appreciate one of the subtle visual axes that he traced and that this home offers. With a distribution and openings that allow a glimpse of the following rooms and invite you to discover them.
A traveler from the cradle and enthusiastic about explaining spaces experienced with the five senses, Vilallonga could continue listing places and references that have impacted her. We are left with some of his sensory journeys: Shiro Kuramata for his lightness, transparency, poetics and humor. Carlo Scarpa, the architect of water who surprises you with his contained sculptural forms. And Mies van der Rohe with his mythical less is more, “made me understand the beauty of the structures seen.”
With multiple interests, her eclectic training included fashion studies at Studio Berçot, industrial design at ESDI and Art History at L’École du Lovre in Paris. “This overlap of training and techniques allowed me to open my vision and encompass a wide range of values. It helps me understand contexts better. It’s like spinning a kaleidoscope where the figures multiply and this allows you to see the solutions with more nuances. It makes you more ductile and adaptable to each context.” From each training, she affirms, she came out enriched “like the little door that L’École du Louvre had towards the Louvre Museum, which you could use as you pleased and which I crossed many times.”
