Casa Batlló

Casa Batlló started life in 1877 as an unremarkable apartment block. In 1904, textile magnate Josep Batlló hired Gaudí not to demolish it but to radically remodel it, and the result is one of Barcelona's most divisive and beloved buildings — an undulating facade of fragmented, colourful tile (trencadís again) and bone-like balconies that has earned it two competing nicknames: locals call it Casa dels Ossos (House of Bones) for the skeletal balcony columns, while the scaled, curved roofline is widely read as a dragon's back, pierced through by a cross-topped turret said to represent St. George's lance.

Inside, Gaudí eliminated straight lines almost entirely wherever he could get away with it — door frames curve, ceilings ripple like water, and a central light well is tiled in graduating shades of blue, darker at the top and lighter toward the bottom, so that natural light distributes evenly throughout the building regardless of floor. The main living floor, the Noble Floor where the Batlló family actually lived, has undulating wood-and-glass partitions and a fireplace nook shaped like a mushroom.