Casa Amatller | Modernisme in Barcelona

Casa Amatller regains its Modernista essence after the restoration work carried out on its main floor.

On 12 March 2015, coinciding with the day in 1898 when chocolate maker Antoni Amatller bought an existing building to turn it into one of the jewels of Catalan Art Nouveau (Modernisme), Casa Amatller was unveiled to the public after a restoration that has given it back its original splendour.

This marks the start of a new chapter for the Fundación Instituto Amatller de Arte Hispánico, which faces the challenge of running a cultural venue as extraordinary as Casa Amatller efficiently and offering the public fascinating visits that help spread the word about the historical, economic and social context that gave rise to Modernisme.

The standard format will be a guided visit in small groups (12 people maximum), following a set route. It will last just under an hour.

Visiting hours: Monday to Sunday, 11am–7pm, booking required. There will be no visits on 1 and 6 January or 25 December.
Phone: 934 617 460 (online sales will be available soon)
Price: €15 (there are discounts for seniors, students, children and friends of Casa Amatller)
Casa Amatller official website.

On the ground floor of the building, in the rooms that still hold the main floor’s kitchen and where the servants’ quarters and the owner’s garage used to be, a café will open where you’ll be able to enjoy hot drinking chocolate made to historical recipes. There will also be a shop with publications, photographs, postcards, souvenirs related to Casa Amatller and chocolate products.

A little history of Casa Amatller

On 12 March 1898, chocolate manufacturer Antoni Amatller Costa (1851–1910) bought a 1,415 m² property at number 101 (later 41) Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona, made up of a house with a ground floor and four storeys and a garden of just over 800 m². He paid 490,000 pesetas for it. It was a building constructed according to the guidelines of the Cerdà plan.

The businessman entrusted the remodelling of the building he had bought, intending to make it his home, to Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1867–1956). Trained in the years of the Renaixença (the Catalan cultural revival), the architect, politician and art historian had a very particular conception of architecture. In his writings he explains that Catalonia was a country that had been one of the powers of the medieval Mediterranean and that, after several centuries of decline, it had regained its economic potential over the 19th century thanks to industrialisation. The country needed to project a new image through a modern architecture that would showcase the drive Catalan society had recovered. To achieve this, it was essential to work with the craft workshops which, revived and strengthened by the literary and historical renaissance, made up a body of craftsmen capable of turning architects’ designs into reality.

Block of Discord, 1898
From an ATV postcard © Institut Amatller d’Art Hispànic

Block of Discord, 1906
From an ATV postcard © Institut Amatller d’Art Hispànic

In the new façade, with echoes of styles from very different periods (from Romanesque to Baroque), the architect shunned the vertical alignment of its elements, placing a different number of openings on each floor and seeking an effect of balanced asymmetry and studied irregularity. The striking stepped gable that crowns it serves to integrate the new photographic studio built on the roof terrace (which regulations required to be set back a few metres from the neighbouring buildings) with the rest of the building.

Puig i Cadafalch made important and innovative use of colour on the façade, along with lavish decoration with sculptural elements that make up a rich iconographic narrative. It brings together allusions to the family name (Amatller, which means almond tree in Catalan: flowering almond branches with capital As, and on the tribune a verse by Dolores Monsardà, Puig i Cadafalch’s mother-in-law), traditional references (Saint George, the dragon and the princess), the owner’s hobbies (painting, sculpture, architecture, music, photography) and, above all, around the three balcony doors, an allegorical portrait of Antoni Amatller himself made up of symbolic images of the three activities that best defined him: industry, the arts (photography among them) and collecting archaeological glass.

The construction of the new façade of what would from then on be known as Casa Amatller marked a radical break with the architectural approaches that had prevailed in Barcelona’s Eixample until then. It stood in stark contrast to the neighbouring buildings in its height (above the regulation 22 m), its composition and its colour. This new trend spread rapidly throughout the city and, within a very few years, transformed the way it looked. The fact that the same block held works by the three most prominent architects of the Modernista movement, Puig i Cadafalch, Domènech i Montaner and Gaudí, led the people of Barcelona, with fine irony and a sound knowledge of classical mythology, to christen this remarkable group of houses the ‘Mansana’ de la Discòrdia (the Block of Discord: in Spanish, manzana means both ‘block’ and ‘apple’), an allusion to the origin of the Trojan War.

After the death of Teresa Amatller in 1960, it was Josep Gudiol who oversaw the conversion of one floor, until then a private home, into the headquarters of the foundation that inherited the chocolate makers’ estate. Respecting the interiors designed by Puig i Cadafalch, the foundation’s director rehoused the art collections and the original furniture in the rooms overlooking Passeig de Gràcia.