Suzanne Wales’s design guide for Barcelona travel
For insights into Barcelona’s creative soul, an Australian expat is offering design-focused tours of the Spanish city that reveal architectural landmarks, top-tier stores and smart eateries.
The slogan appeared on billboards all over town in the 1980s. Barcelona, posa’t guapa: “Barcelona, look your best”. Many would argue that the advice was unnecessary. Spain’s second city and the capital of Catalonia has always been a beauty – not just thanks to its setting, ringed by mountains and lapped by the ocean, but for the attractiveness of its old-town streets and squares and the diversity of its variegated neighbourhoods. It’s the city’s aesthetic dimension, essentially, that brings in admirers from all over the world.
Admirers like design expert, writer, and tour guide Suzanne Wales. Wales grew up in the southeastern suburbs of Melbourne and eventually moved to Barcelona in 1992 – just in time for the Olympic Games, when the city was a bubbling ferment of innovation. A former student of fashion design, she’d always been fascinated by the figure of Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926), the genial creator who has now become almost a personification of his hometown. “I had a book I treasured called Fantastic Architecture where Gaudí was unfairly bundled in with rich people’s follies and art brut. Anyway it got me hooked and I had to come and check it out for myself,” she told me.
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Discover next-level, design-focused destinations in the latest edition of Travel + Luxury magazine, available online and in print on Friday, 21 April.
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Thirty years later this is one of the world’s busiest tourist destinations, with a total of 12 million visitors in 2019 and more expected this year. For many of these folk it’s enough to saunter up the tree-lined walk of the Ramblas before dutifully ticking off top sights like Gaudí’s church of the Sagrada Familia, his Casa Milà and Park Güell, and the sublime Gothic church of Santa Maria del Mar. A small but growing number, however, are looking for a deeper dive. Even for those of us who barely know their pilasters from their pediments, it turns out immersing oneself in Barcelona’s visual heritage can make for a new and enriching kind of holiday.
Which is where Wales comes in. Together with Irishman Brian Gallagher she runs Barcelona Design Tours, a boutique tour agency powered by a passion for the subject and backed up by serious professional expertise. Guided tours of Barcelona are two-a-penny, but this one offers a fast-track into the city’s creative soul. “We get a lot of people on the tours with a special interest in design,” she says. “Our clients are mostly creative types interested in architecture, urbanism and interior design. Of course, we steer them towards the Modernista side of Barcelona, but we like to draw a parallel with what is happening now – and the connections are very strong.”
In a place like this the aesthetic experience often starts the moment you check in to your hotel. From an impressive range of five-star lodgings I chose two that were showcases for design both old and new. One was Edition, part of a high-concept brand created with celebrity hotelier Ian Schrager and a swooningly glamorous sampler of contemporary style. But my first port of call was Casa Sagnier, recently opened as a townhouse hotel having originally been the home and office of leading 19th-century architect Enric Sagnier (1858-1931).
“Sagnier’s house” made a perfect base camp for my explorations. If I leaned out from my balcony on the Rambla de Catalunya I could see the spires of the Church of the Sacred Heart on Mount Tibidabo way above the city – part of a new “Sagnier route” taking in the architect’s most important buildings. At the other end of the timeline, I recognised the bedside light in my room as the famous “basket” lamp by Catalán designer Miguel Milá – an object so perfectly conceived, and so ubiquitous thanks to lighting wizards Santa & Cole that it’s come to be almost a symbol of modern-day Barcelona chic.
On a bright, cold morning Wales and I set off along Passeig de Gràcia, the avenue harbouring emblematic buildings by the likes of Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1867-1956) and Lluis Domènech i Montaner (1849-1923), currently enjoying a major reappraisal in the centenary year of his death. The queues for Gaudi’s Casa Milà (aka La Pedrera, “the quarry”), its stone balconies undulating like some unquiet sea, stretch all the way down into calle Provença. But my guide is already taking me beyond the tourist throng, homing in on the rich visual details. She points out the twisting organic forms of an ironwork street lamp, the benches decorated with colourful trencadis mosaic (co-designed by Gaudí when still a student) and the swirling wall decorations, thick coruscations of plaster, in the entrance hall of a grand mansion.
We stop for a close look at the façade of Palau del Baró de Quadras, a house remodelled by Cadafalch for the wealthy Quadras family of sheep farmers and wool merchants. It’s an architectural feast whose fantastically ornate window frames, neo-Gothic gargoyles, and the kaleidoscopic tiling of the entrance hall betray its origins in the aesthetic movement known as Modernisme (think of it as Catalonia’s response to Art Nouveau). And by chance, under our feet lies a much humbler masterpiece by the same architect-designer: the famous “panot de flor” street tile with its simple flower-like shape, a Barcelona talisman now reproduced on everything from fabric bags to fridge magnets. “That’s what I love about this city – you are constantly seeing new things you might never have noticed before,” says Wales.
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“This new bourgeoisie also needed fine things with which to fill their homes: furniture, lighting, everyday objects. As luck would have it, this demand for stuff coincided with the dawn Modernisme”
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Quite why it was Barcelona, and not Madrid or Seville, that saw such a flowering of art and design in the decades around the turn of the 20th century is a question worth asking. The answer has much to do with the bourgeois propensity for display. From the 1850s onwards a vast urban-planning scheme by Ildefons Cerdà created the extension to Barcelona’s existing medieval old-town known as the Eixample, with apartment blocks on the grid plan. The city’s booming industrial economy had spawned a new breed of middle-class professionals who, in their desire to impress, queued up to hire the fashionable architects of the time to build the most spectacular townhouse, the poshest palacio. This new bourgeoisie also needed fine things with which to fill their homes: furniture, lighting, everyday objects. As luck would have it, this demand for stuff coincided with the dawn of Modernisme, when artisan cabinet-makers, ceramicists, glass-blowers and tile-makers were busily reviving a craft tradition dating back to the Middle Ages.
Making our way up the gentle slope of the Passeig towards the neighbourhood of Gràcia, Wales’s narrative opens out into the city’s second great historical moment as a design hub: the final quarter of the 20th century and the earliest decades of the 21st. We visit the showroom of Nani Marquina, Spain’s foremost designer of drop-dead-beautiful contemporary carpets, in a former garage that’s now a stunning white art-space on various levels. In the same gallery, an exhibition of work by modern Catalán designers includes the olive oil dispenser by Rafael Marquina (father of Nani), a 1961 classic still used in households all over Spain, and Miguel Milà’s 1956 floor lamp, companion piece to his “basket” light, timeless and elegant in its austere simplicity. The perfectly preserved interior at the restaurant Flash Flash, where we repair later for tortillas and beer, shows just how up-to-date Barcelona could be in the mid-1970s, with its curvy bartop and monochrome murals, its banquettes upholstered in groovy white vinyl.
Next morning, armed with a list of Wales’s recommendations, I head down to the seaside and the former industrial area of Poblenou, now a hotbed of modernity in all its forms and a happy hunting ground for lovers of design. Here it’s all about the Barcelona of the Olympic era, when a new generation of creators were given free rein – plus large influxes of cash and political goodwill – to create all manner of colourful inventions. It’s here I understand how the swirling ornate forms of Modernisme intersect with the fecund design environment in the Barcelona of the 1990s. The collections of furniture and homewares at the Museu del Disseny (the Design Museum of Barcelona, housed in a gleaming new building with an overhanging roof by Josep Martorell, Oriol Bohigas and David Mackay of MBM Architects) show original wooden doors by Gaudí and floor tiles by Domènech i Montaner for his glorious Palau de la Música Catalana. Meanwhile, in another part of the museum, pivotal modern pieces by Josep Lluscá, Jaime Tresserra and André Ricard, who designed the Olympic torch, as well as posters and other 1992 memorabilia, give a strong flavour of the excitements of the time. Inside a display case I spy the figure of Javier Mariscal’s “Cobi”, the much-loved Olympic mascot, immortalised in bronze.
Though Barcelona’s design freaks still mourn the demise of Vinçon, the wonderland of disseny that until 2015 had its home in a Modernista palace on Passeig de Gràcia, a host of excellent showrooms and shops remain. High on the list is furniture specialist Cubiñá, family-run for a century, whose 1500 square metres of high-design fabulousness over two floors of a Domènech i Montaner townhouse is practically a cultural destination in its own right. But nowhere has more to say about 20th-century design in Barcelona than BD (it stands for – what else? – Barcelona Design). Occupying a black-painted warehouse in the post-industrial cityscape of Poblenou, BD was founded in 1972 by four young architect-designers, among them Oscar Tusquets, whose sculptural chairs rub shoulders here with a Gaudí armchair from Casa Batlló and Dalí’s wacky “sheep” table. As I wander through the showroom’s high-ceilinged halls, it seems my aesthetic journey has come full circle.
I head back into town through streets warmed by the afternoon sun. But not before a final pit-stop at Mercat dels Encants, a favourite hangout of mine since I first knew Barcelona as a student traveller way back when. Spain’s most authentic, not to say ramshackle, flea market has been held on this site since at least the 14th century, but the old place has recently undergone a radical revamp. A gigantic mirrored roof soaring 25 metres above the ground, the work of architect Fermín Vázquez, both serves as protection from the elements, and reflects all the hustle and bustle of the market below.
It’s true that in the past few years Barcelona’s influence as a design hub has waned while other Spanish cities, like Madrid and Valencia, have forged ahead. Yet the powerful legacy of the 20th century, from Modernisme to the innovations of the 1990s, lives on. What remains is that extraordinary visual heritage, more accessible than ever for a new wave of fans – but also a firm belief that, when it’s done with passion and intelligence, good design can make a major contribution to a city’s health and happiness.
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WHERE TO STAY
Casa Sagnier
Barcelona’s newest five-star property, a townhouse at the heart of the Eixample district, is the epitome of grown-up luxe. Its impeccably soundproofed rooms have solid oakwood floors, chic mid-century Catalán furniture and handwoven linen bedcovers by Manuela. The hotel’s public spaces rejoice in their eclecticism: you might find a red-velvet armchair next to a Miguel Milá lamp, a Laura Torroba mural beside one of Estudio Elefante’s artistic installations invoking Sagnier. Throughout the building, graphic designs by Mucho pay homage to the Modernista architect whose home this was, Enric Sagnier Villavecchia.
Barcelona Edition
Marriott’s top-flight hip-hotel brand opened its first Spanish outpost in 2018 to rapturous acclaim. The slate-lined façade of Carles Ferrater’s building gives a foretaste of the interior’s dialled-down glamour, which slyly mixes mid-century minimalism with heterogeneous elements – gold-framed Baroque mirrors, bold modern art by Eric Schmitt (a huge ceiling lamp in blue glass) and Carlos Coronas, and gorgeous interventions like the spiral staircase in pearl-white marble. Keen-eyed design fans will spot some impressive historic pieces, too, such as the gold “Leda” chair by Salvador Dalí and the corner stools originally designed by Gaudí for Casa Calvet. In the bedrooms, chambers of deep comfort lined with walnut wood, decorative elements are few and well chosen – perhaps a surrealist photo by Chema Madoz, or a “Gaulino” chair by Oscar Tusquets. East-facing windows have a privileged view over the Mercat de Santa Caterina with its gaudily coloured undulating roof by Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue.
Suzanne Wales’ book Made in Spain: A Shopper’s Guide to Artisans and Their Crafts by Region, published by Princeton Architectural Press, will be released in May; barcelonadesigntours.com