A house to hide in, a garden to skate in, an office for the stories of Cavall Fort, a chapel to stock up on carbonated water. All this and much more is the modernist house that has always attracted attention at number 22 Carolines Street, on the borders of Gràcia. What was the family home for some, "the witches' house" or the workplace for others, now generates queues in front of its gates, with visitors waiting to enter Casa Vicens and immerse themselves in the first house designed by Antoni Gaudí.
"Even though they have painted and fixed it, this is my house," says Antonio Herrero. "Carolines 22 is Cavall Fort, I don't care who the owner was," adds a former employee of the magazine. And this modernist jewel was alive and full of daily uses until it was sold in 2014 and opened to the public three years later. Now, its managers have set out to recover these stories that filled the fascinating building with experiences during the 20th century.
"We have information about its origins, but we had practically no information about what happened during the 20th century," highlighted the general director of Casa Vicens, Emili Masferrer. The origin of the building is clear: it was built 140 years ago as a summer house for the Vicens family. However, the Vicens family resided in the peculiar house for only about 15 years, until the widow sold it in 1899. The buyer was Antoni Jover i Puig, and that's practically as far as was known. Until Casa Vicens began to investigate its daily history.
"Although we didn't have this information, this information exists; it is in the houses, in the memories and in the hearts of people who have had a relationship with the house," Masferrer remarked. And these memories have emerged through this project: Antonio Herrero, grandson of Antoni Jover who bought the house 125 years ago, now narrates what it was like to live in the building for 65 years. "For us, Vicens does not exist, it is just a name, which was kept because my mother wanted it, because he built the house. But this is my house, it has been the Jover house for 100 years."
"Before there wasn't a single tourist. Only occasionally someone who wanted to see it would come, especially Japanese people, and my mother would let them in to show it to them," she recalls. The house, however, did open once a year to the neighborhood, and it did so in grand style. For Santa Rita, on May 22, a mass was celebrated in a hermitage that her mother and grandmother had commissioned —and where Antoni used to play by climbing on its roof—. The protagonists were the flowers and, above all, the water: a carbonated water that was famous throughout Gràcia, and for which people would queue to buy it for five cents a glass —especially taxi drivers, as then-neighbor Daniel Giralt-Miracle, now a renowned art critic who was commissioner of the International Gaudí Year 2002, recalls—.
And one day, a family with no less than ten children arrived, settling on an upper floor that the Jover family rented. Among them were Salvador and Lluís Alsius. "When you brought friends from school, they were surprised" and spoke of it as "the house of witches," they recall. More problematic was when they were asked to draw their house at school: "The teacher would look at you and say: 'Oh, come on!'" And they played hide-and-seek, chased each other on bicycles and even with skates.
And upstairs, among colorful tiles and sinuous yet checkered shapes, was the editorial office of Cavall Fort. "Back then we didn't call it Casa Vicens, it was simply Carolines 22. And when you said where you worked, people in the neighborhood recognized the house on Carolines." Even for Sant Medir, the floats often made the route to throw candies in front of the modernist dwelling. "The neighborhood experienced the house on Carolines much more than those of us who worked in it," even if it was for only a few years, as was the case with Rosamaria Budó, who worked from the house for three years before it moved.
The house is full of memories of those who lived and worked in it, but also of micro-stories that await to come to light through this Casa Vicens project, to re-signify this modernist work. "We have been working on this project for months, and with small inquiries we have discovered fascinating stories. But we do not want to limit ourselves to that, but rather we also want to collect small stories, small documents, small photographs that help to draw the history of this house," highlighted its general director. He himself can contribute to this research work: his father says that, when he was little, he used to go with his grandfather to fetch water from the house on Santa Rita's day.
And it is that hundreds of neighbors annually came to 22 Carolines on May 22. The hermitage that housed them was dismantled at the beginning of the decline, which was triggered on the other side of the ocean: the Jovers became rich in Cuba, initially bringing vaccines to the island, and lost a lot after the Cuban Revolution. As a result of that family economic crisis, a decade later it was decided to sell the most secluded section of the house, precisely the corner where the popular hermitage was located. "It was not sold with sadness; it was sold for survival," Herrero recalls. They kept some elements of the chapel, which was moved to another space in the house, and he himself preserves a reconstructed stained glass window.
The house continued with its history and stories, with its hide-and-seek games and even as a workplace, while in 1969 it was declared a historical-artistic monument by the State, and in 2005 it became considered a World Heritage Site by Unesco. Meanwhile, its walls continued to be the scene of family and daily uses until, in 2014, the Herrero-Jover family decided to sell it to the Andorran bank MoraBanc, which opened it to the public after three years of restoration.
Since then, the house set aside its more traditional scenes to become an architectural treasure that attracts modernism lovers and curious tourists to Gaudí's first house, but its more ordinary history is stubborn and now re-emerges to give new meaning to its colorful walls. Thus, what had become a modernist jewel recovers the character of what it had been: a house, a workplace, and a place of encounter and even wonder; everything but a modernist jewel.
And with each story, more stories; with each solved enigma, new enigmas: "We have received a letter from America explaining that the house was not actually bought by my grandfather Antoni, but by his brother José," Antoni unexpectedly revealed, opening a new chapter in this story of stories. Why would someone buy a modernist treasure and then give it to their brother? A new question that Casa Vicens will try to solve to reconstruct the puzzle of its past.