STYLE : VIVA BARCELONA! : INTERIORS

This month, Barcelona is the undisputed sports capital of the world. But for the past decade, the city has been famous as a wellspring of contemporary design. The creation of bright, fresh, often daring interior environments, furniture, graphics and haute couture seems to be a civic philosophy, in fact, might be Barcelona’s favorite sport of all.

The Barri Gotic, or Gothic Quarter, is the ancient heart of Barcelona and one of the most beautiful and best-preserved agglomerations of medieval architecture in Europe. In one of the area’s less glamorous corners, along a narrow, twisting street, Mexican choreographer Gilberto Ruiz-Lang and English historian Francis Golding found a not-quite-crumbling, five-story 19th-Century building for about $20,000.

Six years later, Ruiz-Lang occupies the top floor full time, while Golding, who lives in London, keeps the next floor down as a Barcelona pied-a-terre. Ruiz-Lang remodeled and furnished both places with the help of his friend Antonio Iglesias. To mirror the city’s stylistic diversity in his own living space, Ruiz-Lang has created decorative vignettes in which objects of similar style or feeling--be they Mexican folk art, flea market bric-a-brac or an original Galle Art Nouveau lampshade--are grouped together against Luis Barragan-inspired color-blocked walls.

In Golding’s apartment, Ruiz-Lang and Iglesias discovered layers of pastel paint behind the garish wallpaper and decided that the walls looked more attractive in their patchy, just-stripped state than they would properly finished. They even hung empty picture frames to spotlight particularly interesting bits of texture. Golding liked the look but insisted on adding paintings by Ruiz-Lang and collages by Iglesias. For furnishings, he preferred a few strong pieces--an antique writing table, a wicker crib, a couple of low-slung ‘50s wing chairs--to Ruiz-Lang’s creative clutter.