Casa Vicens

Museum · GràciaBarcelona,Spain

Gaudí's first house, in Barcelona's Gràcia, its chequerboard tile and ironwork copied from the marigolds and fan palm growing on the plot.

Casa Vicens is Gaudí's first house, and its green-and-white chequerboard tile climbs the brick and does not stop until the turret. The ornament came off the ground it stands on: marigolds growing on the plot became ceramic tiles, and the leaf of a dwarf fan palm was cast over and over into the iron railing. Inside, the rooms are small and almost no surface is left plain — ivy, cherries and birds painted up the dining-room walls and across the ceiling, a smoking room roofed in gilded papier-mâché, patterned tile underfoot. Gaudí was in his early thirties and barely known when he drew it, working from engravings and photographic plates of Mudéjar brickwork and Islamic tile he had never seen in life. He set the result on a narrow lane in Gràcia, then still a town of its own, where Barcelona families kept summer houses. The Vicens family sold up within a generation, the next owners kept the house for more than a century, and it opened as a museum only in 2017 — the last of Gaudí's major houses to do so.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The quietest of the big Gaudí houses — the rooms are small, so let a group move ahead and take each one alone rather than shuffling through behind them.
Glazed tile needs low sun — at midday the green-and-white grid flattens to grey, while in late light the glaze looks wet and the marigold bands burn yellow.
Try to find the join — part of the house was added about forty years later, in Gaudí's own manner. Almost everyone walks past the seam without seeing it.
Read it as a summer house, not a showpiece — the shaded gallery in front of the dining room, the tiled surfaces, the thick brick: all of it answers a Barcelona August.

Things to do

1
Read the facade in strips
The lane is too narrow to take the house in at once, so read it in strips. Start at the iron gate: the same fan-palm leaf, cast again and again, until your eye stops registering it. Then follow one vertical band of wall up through brick, tile and marigold to the turret, and step along and do it again.
2
Walk the ground-floor rooms with your eyes up
In the dining room keep your eyes at picture-rail height and walk the whole perimeter before looking at anything else. Ivy and cherry branches climb the walls and cross onto the ceiling with birds worked in among them, some flat, some in relief. Then step into the small smoking room, stand under the middle of the ceiling and look straight up at the gilded papier-mâché cells hanging down in blue and gold, cell inside cell. Hold still: in the low light the depth only opens up once your eyes adjust.
3
Finish at the top of the house
Save the top of the house for last. On the terrace the chimneys and the tiled turret come within arm's reach instead of the distant silhouette you saw from the street. Then look outward: later apartment blocks press in on every side, taller than the villa they grew up around, with almost nothing left of its garden.