When, as an architecture student in Barcelona 35 years ago, Ignacio Herrero
was asked to draw Casa Vicens, Antonio Gaudi’s first significant building in
the city, he knew the house better than most. He’d grown up there.
“I was born in this room, delivered by my father, who was a doctor,” says
Herrero, now 56, indicating the downstairs dining room – faded but still
overwhelming, with African marigold-motif tiles, painted birds flying across
the walls and papier-mâché foliage spilling out from between the beams.
The ground floor, which includes a conservatory with Japanese shutters
overlooking the short, palm-lined driveway, remains as it was in 1883, when
Gaudi designed the house – the year he was commissioned to build the Sagrada
Familia cathedral.
Yet Herrero, who dismisses the suggestion that growing up in a Gaudi house
inspired him to become an architect, admits to having been a little slapdash
with the measurements in his student design. “A few details in my drawings
weren’t very exact,” he says. “But they were copied in every textbook about
Gaudi for years. It was only when we started restoring some parts of the
house, several years ago, that the place was finally measured correctly.”
Built by Gaudi as a family home for Manuel Vicens, a tile-factory owner whose
ceramics were put to lavish use on every wall, inside and out, Casa Vicens
has been in Herrero’s family since 1899, when his grandfather, Antonio Jover
– a doctor and the deputy mayor of Barcelona – bought it as a summer house
and rerecruited the up-and-coming architect to complete his flamboyant
vision.
The Jovers have lived there ever since: Herrero’s parents until they died a
few years ago; and currently two of his brothers, Antonio and Javier, with
their families, as well as Herrero’s 31-year-old son, Nacho, who is also an
architect.
Now, after 108 years of keeping it in the family, the Herreros have decided to
sell, with a guide price of €35m(£24.1m).
“It’s a pretty house, but it’s uncomfortable and none of us particularly wants
to keep it up,” Herrero says. “We four brothers own the house, but two of us
have families and live elsewhere [Carlos, the fourth brother, is a doctor in
Girona]. To run the house as a Gaudi museum, with 2,000 people tramping
through the door every day, would mean full-time dedication, so we have
agreed to sell,” he says.
Tucked away on a residential back-street in the Gracia district, the house –
which overflows with what would become the architect’s trademark fairy-tale
flourishes, seen in later commissions such as Parc Guell and La Pedrera – is
now incongruously crowded by neighbouring apartment blocks.
Back when Gaudi was poring over the plans, however, Gracia was a separate
village, surrounded by fields, and Casa Vicens was an occasional retreat for
Antonio Jover and his family, whose main residence, until they moved into
the house permanently in 1924, was in the city centre, just two miles away.
In 1925, with Gaudi’s approval, the upper floors of the 12-bedroom,
10-bathroom house – which spans 1,260 square metres, including two terraces
– were converted into three separate flats.
“When my parents were growing up in the house, there was a small theatre where
they would perform family plays,” Herrero says. As children, he and his
brothers would play hide-and-seek in the opulent Arabian-style smoking room,
with its gold honeycomb ceiling, and run through the brightly tiled rooftop
turrets and rooms interconnected by doorways at unexpected angles, the floor
levels dipping and rising.
“As it was a summer house, the idea was to blur the boundaries so you never
quite knew if you were indoors or out, with flowers, trees and birds
everywhere, and trompe l’oeil columns and domes on the ceiling,” says
Herrero, who now lives in a 15th-century farmhouse near Girona, which he
spent a Gaudi-like 20 years restoring from a ruin.
“The more you understand about Gaudi, the more you appreciate this house.
Every detail has a meaning.
Otherwise, you just look and wonder, ‘Why are all the floors at different
levels?’” Growing up in Casa Vicens, Herrero never thought the house was
anything special. “I knew it was big compared with my friends’ apartments,
so we would always play here, but I couldn’t have told you whether it was
dogs or people on the murals that I passed by every day,” he says. “The
ground floor was the family hub, where, when my brothers and I were all
training to be architects or doctors, we would gather at the end of the day
to catch up.”
Casa Vicens is one of only two of Gaudi’s Barcelona buildings that is not open
to the public. The other is Torre Bellesguard, a neogothic pile under
Tibidabo mountain. Two others are in private hands: La Pedrera, owned by
Caixa Catalunya bank, and Casa Batllo, which is in the possession of the
Bernat family, the former owners of Chupa Chups lollies.
Without the Gaudi connection, Casa Vicens would be worth about a third of its
asking price, says Alfonso Aguilera, who represents Altadicion, which has
been appointed to sell the property. “And if you take La Pedrera as an
example, which has about 1m visitors a year paying £4 each, Casa Vicens
could bring in about £4m a year as a tourist attraction,” Aguilera adds.
“People have shown interest in buying this house for about 20 years, but
this is the first time it’s been for sale. We have a French client who is
interested in buying it – along with the convent next door, for about £7m –
and converting both into a big Gaudi museum.”
Selling houses at this level in Barcelona, however, is a covert operation –
and Casa Vicens is thought to be the most expensive property on the market.
“It’s our home, but it also feels like it belongs a bit to everyone, as it
is part of the Catalan heritage,” Herrero explains, “so we don’t want to
publicise too much locally the fact that it’s for sale.”
Tellingly, Altadicion’s website for Casa Vicens has been translated into
Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and English – but not Spanish or Catalan.
“They aren’t our target markets,” Aguilera says.
Alex Vaughan, from Lucas Fox estate agency in Barcelona, observes that most
high-end properties in the city change hands between Catalan buyers without
hitting the market. “There are rumours of a house in Pedralbes, in the Zona
Alta, on sale for £55m, but I’ve never seen it,” he says. He also questions
whether Casa Vicens offers what Russian and Arabic buyers are looking for in
Barcelona.
“We deal with a lot of Russian clients. They look for privacy and security,
and tend to go for properties on the coast. Arab buyers want at least 2,500
square metres, as they often bring large families and entourages for the
entire summer.” Barcelona is a compact city, where, if you want a house, you
are limited mainly to the Zona Alta.
“Even with this Gaudi house, the location isn’t brilliant,” Vaughan concludes.
“I doubt it would be that comfortable as a family house, but it will
probably be of interest to a foreign collector.”
If you are interested, don’t forget that DIY becomes a headache when the
property in question is listed as a Unesco World Heritage Site. Asked how he
managed, Herrero replies: “Blackmail and bargaining. It’s the only way.
There are numerous organisations you have to approach if you want to change
anything – and nobody wants to take responsibility for granting permission.
“I spent two years being refused permission to renovate the dome on the roof.
When the local government approached me, asking if they could open up the
house to visitors during Gaudi Year, in 2002, I said only if they gave me
planning permission. So they did.”
After five boom years, in which property prices were rising by about 20% a
year, Barcelona’s housing market saw a slowdown in 2006, with prices
stabilising or rising only a little – although, at €621,000 (£428,000),
according to the Spanish property website Kyero.com, the average house price
is still 2½ times the national average.
“The good stuff is still selling, but properties are taking longer to sell and
buyers are being more cautious,” says Vaughan. John Taylor estate agency,
whose high-end properties appeal to footballers relocating to play for
Barcelona – “especially ones from the UK”, according to the agency’s
François Carrière Pastor – has houses in the hills overlooking the city for
up to £9m, and city-centre penthouses for up to £2m, including flats at
PG45, next door to Gaudi’s Casa Batllo, from €12,000 (£8,275) per square
metre.
Casa Vicens’s price tag bears no relation to the going market rate, Carrière
Pastor says. “This price is not realistic. It has prestige, but it is by no
means the best house in Barcelona.”
The Gaudi touch makes for a fascinating property, but one that appeals to a
niche market. Buyers with multi-million budgets to blow in Barcelona can
find larger, lower-maintenance and more secluded houses elsewhere in the
city.
Yet security, assures Herrero, is not a problem. As he hovers by the lavish
iron gates and fences, their palm-frond designs curling into theatrical
spikes, he says: “There’s no problem with intruders. I think most people are
more scared of what’s inside than we are of them.”
Casa Vicens; www.casavicens.es .
Altadicion; 00 34 93 467 0477,
www.altadicion.com . Bective Leslie Marsh; 020 7589 6677, www.bectivelesliemarsh.co.uk
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