Casa BatllóAlmost no straight lines on the walls

Those few minutes across the street

Barcelona, Spain — Remodelled residence.

Start by standing across the street first.

The pavement is not wide; you have to step to the opposite side to take in the whole building. The windows at street level are stretched ovals, their stone frames worn into waves, and looking up, the balcony ironwork is like a row of beached skeletons. The wall is laid with small glazed tiles, blue-green with a touch of ochre, and when the sun angles across, each fragment reflects light at a different angle, reading as a single scale from afar. Some on the street raise a camera; others just wait for the red light and glance up before moving on. The building sits tight against its neighbours with a clean shared edge, yet this one refuses to be straight.

Push the door and a different quiet begins. Light leaks from a skylight above and falls on curved walls with no hard corners. The stair winds up around the atrium, its wooden handrail worn bright from use. Climb two floors and look back: the blue-green you saw on the street is now only a small patch in the window glass. Voices inside are kept low; footsteps on the boards carry a faint echo.

An ordinary house of 1877

This building did not start life as the Batlló family's home. In 1877, Lluís Sala Sánchez commissioned Emili Sala Cortés to build a residence on this avenue — an ordinary eclectic style of the time, with a basement, a ground floor and four upper floors behind a garden. Set among a row of similar houses, it drew no attention.

Josep Batlló bought it in 1903. The house itself was not charming; what he wanted was the address. At the turn of the century this stretch of avenue was the city's smartest place to live, where wealthy families competed house by house and a façade spoke for its owner. Once the location was settled, the only question was how to remodel it.

The old building was not demolished. The basement, several floors and the rear garden were kept; the shell and the vertical circulation were changed the most. That approach became the building's most lasting charm: new work grew on an old skeleton, and the seams were left visible.

The 1904 remodelling

Antoni Gaudí took over the redesign in 1904, and work truly began once the design was fixed. He was not alone: Domènec Sugrañes i Gras, Josep Canaleta and Joan Rubió were all part of the remodelling team. It has been repaired several times since completion, so what we see today is not a snapshot of any single year.

The stretch of street it sits on has an ungracious name, Illa de la Discòrdia — the Block of Discord — for four modernista buildings standing side by side, each insisting on its own idea and yielding to none. Seeing all four together makes it easier to understand why this one twists: a straight line is common sense elsewhere, here it became a choice that needed explaining.

Pinning it to a single style is hard. Critics usually only say it belongs to modernisme in the broad sense, because the irregular oval windows at street level, the stone frames carved into motion, and the tile-and-mosaic skin are difficult to fit into any ready-made category.

Later rounds of repair

After 1904 the building went through several more restorations, with materials and methods that don't fully match. Re-pointing of the façade, replacement of timber, and changes to the interiors can all make a photo disagree with the present site. Look at the form and the materials themselves rather than chasing which year a picture was taken.

Most contemporary remodellings smoothed away the old traces; here the two eras are layered instead. Floor heights and window positions still follow nineteenth-century rules, while the curved surfaces and colours are twentieth-century additions. Walking up and down reveals this relationship better than standing across the street.

This street rewards slow walking. The houses stand close; a few steps change the angle and the relationship between façades shifts again. After seeing it, return to the opposite side and the whole building becomes a flat picture once more.