Palau Güell

Palace · El Raval, off La Rambla (Ciutat Vella)Barcelona,Spain

A Gaudí mansion on a narrow Raval lane, lit from a three-storey central hall whose pierced dome reads from below as a night sky.

Palau Güell is lit from the middle, because it has almost no outside wall to open. Eusebi Güell bought a plot on a narrow lane in the Raval, with a frontage of eighteen metres and neighbours pressed against three sides. Gaudí answered it by cutting a hall three storeys high through the centre of the house. Its parabolic dome is pierced with small round holes, and from the floor at midday the ceiling reads as a sky full of points of light. The family chapel folded out of one wall of that room, and an organ plays down into it. Güell had made his money in textiles and cement. In the 1880s Barcelona's rich were moving out to the new grid of the Eixample, but he wanted his house next to the one his family already owned, so he built here instead. What he was buying was a palace address in a quarter that was already poor. The house closed for seven years of repair and opened again in 2011.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look at the two front arches from across the lane — they are wide enough for a carriage to drive in and turn inside the building, which is why the ground floor feels like a yard.
One of the few Gaudi buildings with room to stand still — it is minutes from La Rambla and rarely full, so you can stay in a room long enough to look up twice.
Check the ironwork between the arches — the Catalan arms sit inside a helmeted crest, hammered rather than cast, and the bars are thin enough to see the street through.

Things to do

1
Read the light shaft from the floor
Walk to the middle of the main hall on the first floor and put your head back. The dome closes over you in a parabola and the pinholes in it come out one by one as your eyes adjust. Then look at the walls: there are galleries at two levels above you, so the family could watch the room without entering it.
2
Open the wall that is a chapel
On the hall's rear wall, look for the panelling that does not match. It opens: the whole chapel unfolded out of the wall for services and shut again afterwards, so a private house could hold mass in its main reception room without keeping a chapel standing in it all week.
3
Cross the roof between the chimneys
Come out on the terrace and go slowly around the central spire. Each chimney is a different shape and a different surface, and you can see the seams where new tiling meets old. Look down over the edge: the lane below is barely wide enough for two cars, which is the plot Gaudi was given.