Photo: Steven Ungermann / Unsplash
This Apartment Put the Bathtub in the Living Room. It's Not a Gimmick.
Inspired by SIGLA Studio's Turó Park apartment, as featured on Design Milk (design-milk.com/sigla-studio-barcelona-apartment-open-bathroom).
Most apartments treat the bathroom like something to apologize for — tucked behind a door, given the smallest window, designed to be forgotten the moment you leave it. A new apartment in Barcelona's Turó Park neighborhood does the opposite: it puts the bathtub in full view of the living room, under a vaulted ceiling of glazed green tile, framed by an arched doorway that looks more like an invitation than a threshold.
Designed by SIGLA Studio for a client relocating from a home of cramped, light-starved rooms, the 635-square-foot apartment reorganizes itself around a single doorless bathroom at its center — one that can be screened off with a custom pivoting glass enclosure when privacy is actually needed, but stays open the rest of the time, letting light travel clean through the whole space instead of stopping at a wall. The enclosure isn't off-the-shelf; the studio's co-founder has described it as purpose-built for this exact apartment, fabricated by a local metalworker rather than pulled from a catalog. That detail matters more than it sounds — this isn't a trend applied on top of a floor plan, it's a floor plan built around a genuinely different idea of what a bathroom is for.
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Photo: Chastity Cortijo / Unsplash
And that idea is the real subject here, more than the very good tilework. The design's underlying logic is refreshingly blunt: why does the kitchen get to be the social heart of the home while every other private function gets shoved behind a door? SIGLA's answer removes that hierarchy entirely, folding kitchen, bathroom, and dressing area into one connected, light-filled volume instead of a string of sealed-off rooms.
There's something worth sitting with in why this feels so instantly comforting rather than exposing. A bathroom, done right, is one of the only rooms in a home that's built purely around slowing down — not working, not hosting, not performing, just recovering. Burying that function behind the smallest, dimmest door in the house has always been a slightly strange choice, when you think about it; it treats the room where you're supposed to feel safest and most at ease like something to be embarrassed of. Putting it at the literal center of the home instead — bathed in the same light as everything else — reframes it as exactly what it already was doing quietly all along: the room that tells your body it's actually home, and it's actually allowed to unclench.
That instinct tracks with something bigger happening in interior design right now, well beyond this one apartment. The rigid, one-size-fits-all floor plan — bedroom here, bathroom there, everything walled off according to a script nobody actually chose — is quietly losing its grip. What's replacing it is far more personal: homes shaped around how someone specifically wants to live, not around a generic blueprint everyone's expected to conform to. And increasingly, that personalization is landing squarely on the bathroom, of all rooms. People are putting real thought and real money into making it a place worth lingering in — not just a functional pit stop, but a small, deliberate recharge station between an exhausting day and the rest of an exhausting week.
Not every home has the square footage — or the client, or the metalworker on speed dial — to remove a bathroom wall entirely. But the underlying instinct scales down just fine: better light, less concealment, a little more intention spent on the room where you're supposed to actually rest. This apartment just happens to make the argument as loudly, and as beautifully, as possible.