Before Casa Batlló, before La Pedrera, before the Sagrada Família became his life’s work, Antoni Gaudí built a summer house for a stockbroker. Work began in 1883, Gaudí was just over thirty, and Casa Vicens was his first major commission.
It is a house that looks like nothing that came after it: straight lines instead of curves, brick, stone and chequered tiles, turrets that make you think of the East. And yet Gaudí’s whole method is already there, taking his decoration from what he finds on the site. For more than a century it remained a private home, and it has been open to visitors only since 2017.
On the day of your visit, check the website: Casa Vicens often changes its hours at short notice. In October 2026 it closed for a whole day, closed earlier than usual on other days and, because of rain, suspended visits from Saturday evening to Sunday afternoon.
What do wild flowers have to do with the façade of a house?
A summer house in a town that was not yet Barcelona
The client was Manel Vicens, a stock and exchange broker, who had inherited a plot of land in Gràcia from his mother. Today Gràcia is a neighbourhood of Barcelona, but at the time it was a town in its own right, with its own town hall, and middle-class families had their holiday homes there: close to the city, but as quiet as a village. Gràcia was annexed to Barcelona only in 1897.
The plans were submitted to Gràcia town council in 1883 and the house was built between 1883 and 1885, for Vicens and his wife Dolors Giralt. In those same years Gaudí took over the building site of the Sagrada Família, which he would never leave again.
The house’s website describes it as a work twenty years ahead of modernisme: it already contains the structural solutions and decorative motifs that would become Gaudí’s language.
The yellow flowers and the dwarf palm
Gaudí took the motifs for the tiles and the gate from the plot itself. When he went to take measurements, the land was covered in yellow flowers, marigolds, which in Catalan are called clavells de moro, and there was a thriving dwarf palm, the margalló, the palm that grows wild in Catalonia. Gaudí used both: the flowers became the motif of the tiles, the palm leaves the grille of the gate. He told the story himself, years later.
The façades alternate masonry and rows of tiles, and the house had three of them, because the fourth side backed onto the wall of a convent.
The palm-leaf railings you see in front of the house today are only part of the original ones. When another part of the garden was sold for building in 1963, the railings were taken down, and some pieces ended up in Park Güell, where today they close off the main entrance: if you go there, you will recognise them at once. The story of that park is in Park Güell, the failed luxury estate.
Inside: a Moorish smoking room and a sky full of birds
What is an Islamic vault doing in a summer house in Gràcia?
It is the mark of Gaudí’s Orientalist period: in the years of Casa Vicens he was studying Spanish Islamic art and the art of India, Persia and Japan, including through Owen Jones’s illustrated books on the Alhambra.
The most famous room is the smoking room: the ceiling is a vault of muqarnas, the stalactite-like niches of Islamic architecture, in painted plaster, reproducing palm leaves with bunches of dates.
On the first floor, in the sitting room above the smoking room, look up: the ceiling has a painted false dome, a trompe-l’oeil that opens a blue sky over the room, with white birds in flight.
The gallery and the fountain that made a rainbow
Next to the dining room is a covered gallery, closed by wooden screens in an Oriental taste which, when opened, turned the room into an open-air space on the garden. In the middle Gaudí placed a fountain: a basin on a pedestal and an elliptical metal grille, like a spider’s web, from which the water fell in a thin veil. When the light passed through it, the veil showed the colours of the rainbow.
That fountain was missing for ninety years. With the extension of 1925-1927 the gallery was closed in with glazing and the fountain removed; it returned to its place with the restoration completed in 2017, together with a system of latticed shutters that takes up the idea of the open space, and since June 2019 the water has been flowing again.
How the house grew, and how it was taken back
Why is the house you see today bigger than the one Gaudí built?
In 1899 Vicens’s widow sold the house to the paediatrician Antoni Jover, who in 1925 wanted to enlarge it and make it his main residence. He asked Gaudí to take it on, but Gaudí, who by then worked only on the Sagrada Família, declined and recommended a younger architect, Joan Baptista Serra de Martínez. Between 1925 and 1927 Serra built a new half of the house on the convent side, imitating Gaudí’s style, and divided it into three flats, one per floor. To do so he replaced the original staircase.
From outside you can still see the difference: Serra’s half juts out slightly over the street, and its tiles are laid evenly, whereas Gaudí alternated them. The garden, meanwhile, was sold off in pieces, in 1946 and 1963.
In 2014 the house was bought by MoraBanc, a bank from Andorra, and restored between 2015 and 2017 by the architects José Antonio Martínez Lapeña and Elías Torres with the Daw Office studio. The restoration focused the visit on Gaudí’s rooms and placed the reception and the exhibition in Serra’s extension, where you will find the scale model of the house as it was before 1925. Casa Vicens opened to the public on 16 November 2017, and since 2005 it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with Casa Batlló, the crypt of the Colònia Güell and two parts of the Sagrada Família, the Nativity façade and the crypt.
Practical information
Details checked on 27 October 2026 on the official website, casavicens.org. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Lesseps is also the station for going up to Park Güell, where you will find the palm-leaf railings again. To see what Gaudí did twenty years later with the same ideas about light and decoration, the next step is Casa Batlló and La Pedrera.
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, all by Enric, CC BY-SA 4.0.
