Lluís Domènech i Montaner House-Museum

Two UNESCO World Heritage buildings were drawn in a sixteenth-century farmhouse in a small Maresme seaside town. Lluís Domènech i Montaner kept his architecture studio in the Masia Rocosa at Canet de Mar, and it was there — not in Barcelona — that he worked up the Palau de la Música Catalana and the Hospital de Sant Pau.

Why an architect from Barcelona worked here

Domènech i Montaner (1849–1923) was born in Barcelona and built his career there, but two family lines tied him to Canet de Mar: his mother, Maria Montaner, came from the town’s fortified house, and his wife, Maria Roura, was born in the village. He spent long stretches here, particularly in summer, and set up his drawing office in the Masia Rocosa. The list of projects that passed across that desk is disproportionate to the setting — the Cafè-Restaurant for the 1888 Universal Exposition, the Comillas University, the Palau de la Música Catalana, the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau.

Two buildings, two registers

The museum is the farmhouse plus Casa Domènech, the residence he built next to it between 1908 and 1910 with his son Pere Domènech and his son-in-law Francesc Guàrdia. The house is the private register: family, friends, the architect’s relationship with the town. Upstairs the original room layout survives, used to show his work in graphic arts, art history, monumental architecture, and his teaching and directorship at Barcelona’s School of Architecture. The whole complex opened as a museum in 1998 after careful restoration, and was reworked museographically in 2011.

The habit that makes the collection unusual

Domènech routinely asked his collaborators for copies of the work they produced for him. The result is a studio full of duplicates of things installed elsewhere: decoration from Barcelona’s Fonda Espanya, plaster models for Comillas, ceramic pieces distributed through the house. For a visitor this is more useful than it sounds — it puts the components of famous buildings at arm’s length, at a scale you can look at closely. The museum also documents a side of him that architecture tours skip: he was a central figure in political Catalanism, and a large part of his correspondence and his studies of Catalan heraldry are held here.

Frequently asked questions