Casa Vicens came out of books. Antoni Gaudí was in his early thirties and barely known, working from engravings and photographic plates — Mudéjar brickwork, Islamic tile — of buildings he had never seen. He set the result on a narrow lane in Gràcia, then still a town of its own, where Barcelona families kept summer houses. The ground supplied the ornament: marigolds growing on the plot became ceramic tiles, and a dwarf fan palm's leaf 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. Outside, the green-and-white chequerboard climbs the brick and does not stop until the turret. 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.