Over 130 years after legendary Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Vicens was built, it’s finally set to open to the public this fall as a new museum. The house is located in Barcelona, Spain, where many of Gaudí’s architectural masterpieces still stand.
As explained in a blog post on the Casa Vicens website, Gaudí designed Casa Vicens to be a summer home for broker-dealer Manel Vicens i Montaner. Gaudí was just 31 when he devised the home, which was finished in 1885. A family by the name of Jover purchased the house in 1899, and in 1925, they commissioned Gaudí’s friend Joan Baptista Serra de Martínez to design renovations for the property. The changes turned the one-family home into a three-family residence, and Gaudí’s original staircase was removed in the process. By 1993, Barcelona named Casa Vicens a historical monument, and in 2005, UNESCO declared the building a World Human Heritage Site. The home was placed on the market in 2007, but it didn’t sell until 2014. The Andorran bank MoraBanc was the lucky buyer, purchasing the house with plans to eventually restore it and open it to visitors. (It’s not a huge surprise that this project has been slow-moving: Gaudí’s La Sagrada Familia has infamously been under construction in Barcelona for approximately a century.)
Now, three years later, the bank's vision has finally become a reality. “The rehabilitation of the house started in 2015, and the opening of the house as a cultural space is planned for this autumn 2017,” reads an announcement in the blog post. Architecture studio Martínez Lapeña-Torres Arquitectes S.L.P. and architects José Antonio Martínez Lapeña, Elías Torres, and David García are the minds behind the rehabilitation, along with the joint venture Calaf AMC5. The team began working on the restoration in April 2015 with a strong intent to respect Antoni Gaudí’s work, so you can count on the original details to remain as intact as possible. An opening date and pricing information have not yet been announced for the museum.
Check out a few more photos of Casa Vicens, below.
