They say that on the corner of La Rambla and Carrer del Carme, for years there was a red scale where any neighbor could weigh themselves for free, and that's where the building got its name: El Regulador. Others claim that the jewelry store that was there was already called that before the scale arrived. It has never been fully confirmed. What no one disputes is that today, at number 105, no one weighs themselves anymore: now one enjoys an exquisite space, eats, or sleeps.
Rambla 105 is the address of Hotel Bagués, protagonist of chapter 29 of Hoteles con Historia e Historias de Hoteles, the series we publish every 15 days in The New Barcelona Post, and the first from the Derby Hotels group to appear in these installments. The logical order would have been to start with the Claris, the group's flagship, although this property, which also deserves a chapter, will come later.
The Bagués is located between the Palau de la Virreina and the Betlem church, a few doors from the Méridien we visited in chapter 15, the 1898 in chapter 16, and on the same promenade as the Cuatro Naciones, with which the series began. It is the Rambla of chapters 1, 15, and 16, although this time the story is not about stagecoaches, tobacco, or empty lots, but about jewels.
An architect, a developer, and five floors
The building was erected around 1850 by architect Josep Fontserè i Domènech at the request of Francesc Piña. The idea was simple: five floors in a romantic classicist style, with Italian influence, to be rented by apartment. On the ground floor, semicircular doorways with stone cladding for shops and, separately, the staircase door.
Fontserè was no ordinary architect. Years later he would design the Mercat del Born and Ciutadella Park, where a student named Antoni Gaudí helped him with the calculations for the monumental waterfall. On La Rambla, Fontserè left an elegant and discreet residential building. The extraordinary would come later, starting with the ground floor.
El Regulador, between the clock and the scale
Between 1883 and 1895, as sources do not agree on the exact year, Joan Boix, a resident of the house and jeweler, acquired the ground floor, renovated it in a very ornate style, and opened a watch and jewelry store which he named El Regulador.
A watchmaker's name, by the way, and not that of a scale, although we have already seen that the scale has its own legend. The version told by the Derby chain says that it was freely available for neighbors and customers of the Boqueria market, two steps away. The opposite version maintains that it was installed in the 1940s, when the jewelry already had that name. Choose the one you prefer: both are good stories, and in this series we know that sometimes legends weigh more than some facts.
The Bagués and the gold behind the tiles
In 1926, brothers Narcís and Amadeu Bagués opened their own workshop and jewelry store in Ciutat Vella. They had to survive the war and the post-war period, and family tradition explains that they managed to do so by hiding the workshop's gold behind the tiles of the back room. Thanks to this, in 1948 they were able to move to La Rambla and take over El Regulador. In 1955 they renovated the ground floor to restore it to Fontserè's original design, with a small exterior change that, they say, was much talked about for decades.
Masriera, the other half of the surname
The second name of the firm comes from further back. In 1839, Josep Masriera i Vidal opened a jewelry workshop in Barcelona, and his grandson Lluís Masriera, after training in Switzerland and Paris, brought Art Nouveau to Catalan jewelry. Dragonflies, fairies, flowers and enamels as transparent as stained glass, with the plique-à-jour technique. His pieces have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the MNAC.
In 1950, Masriera merged with the Carreras house, and the Bagués gradually acquired shares until they took control in 1985. Since then, the firm is Bagués-Masriera. And it is still active: today it has its store on Passeig de Gràcia, in Puig i Cadafalch's Casa Ametller.
From workshop to hotel
Back to La Rambla: in 2010, the house at number 105 changed its profession. Joan Oliveras Bagués, at the head of the firm, and Jordi Clos, president of Derby Hotels, created a 50% partnership: Oliveras contributed the building and Derby the management. After two years of work, a 31-room hotel was opened. Clos then acknowledged that it was the most expensive construction cost per room of the entire chain.
The interior design was inspired by the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, with the more sober lines of Art Nouveau, and worked with Madagascar ebony and gold leaf. Each room displays a piece from the Masriera collection, there is a museum-room with modernist glass vases by Émile Gallé, and at the highest part, a terrace with a small pool from which you can see the cathedral, the bell tower of El Pi, and the star of Bethlehem, which can almost be touched. The restaurant, of course, is called El Regulador.
And La Rambla under construction
Since October 2022, La Rambla has been living amidst fences, detours, and dust. The renovation, with an investment of about 55.6 million euros (11 more than planned), should be inaugurated on the weekend of February 13 and 14, 2027, with a big citizen celebration, if there are no further delays. Among the novelties is a square in the Palau Moja-Betlem area, that is, almost at the door of the Bagués.
Guests, diners, or curious visitors who approach these days will still have to navigate some fences, although the building has seen worse and longer things. It has been a neighbors' house, a jewelry store, a watchmaker's, a workshop, and a hotel. It has gone through wars, changing customs, mayors who came and went, and fashions that ended. The current long urban works, like everything, will pass, and the building will remain there.
A jewel that was a jewelry store. Or rather, a jewel that continues to be one: the one Fontserè carved in stone, the one Boix set to tell time, the one the Bagués made shine by hiding gold behind some tiles, and the one Clos knew how to embed in a Rambla that, if all goes well, will debut its new setting in February.
And as in this series we like to leave the door open, the next Derby hotel, which logically should have been the first, will arrive in a few weeks: the Claris. For now, its Bagués has starred in chapter 29 of this series in The New Barcelona Post.
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