Ohla! A Thousand Eyes, Police and a Department Store

We return to Via Laietana for Chapter 27 of Hotels with History: the series we publish fortnightly in The New Barcelona Post. This time, we stop at number 49, where the Ohla watches us. Literally. A thousand eyes. This was once home to a department store far more important than most people remember today; there was also (or so they say — it has never been fully confirmed, and I have stopped trying to find out) a Masonic lodge, and later, a police station. Today, it is a hotel. And its developers, it should be said, healed an urban wound that had remained open for decades.

Anyone walking along Via Laietana eventually feels watched. It is not the cars, nor the tourists, nor the cyclists, nor the shop windows on the way to the Palau de la Música. It is an entire façade covered with ceramic eyes that stare back if you dare to hold their gaze. That is the Ohla. And this game of looking and being looked at is not an aesthetic whim, however much it may seem so at first glance. Almost without anyone realising it, it sums up a hundred years in the life of a stately building. Once you understand that, everything falls into place.

Before becoming a hotel intended to carry four stars — though it ultimately earned five — 49 Via Laietana had many lives. A shop window designed to seduce passers-by. Presumably, a lodge that preferred not to be seen. And a police station that watched over others. Ohla, indeed: there has always been someone watching here.

Casa Vilardell: from Hospital Street to Via Laietana

The history of the name by which many still remember it does not begin on Via Laietana, but a little further away, on Hospital Street, in 1907, with a modest shop called Casa Vilardell. The brand experienced twenty years of continuous growth: a branch in Comte de l'Assalt (today Nou de la Rambla) in 1911, another in C/ Carme in 1916, another in Fontanella in 1922, and another in Salmerón (today Gran de Gràcia) in 1928. Vilardell was not yet the giant it would become, but its intentions were already clear: discounts, gifts, and striking advertisements in the press. They applied what we now call aggressive marketing, although they targeted a clientele with reasonable purchasing power. Some chroniclers say that impulse selling practically originated here, which I doubt, to be honest, but it's a good story and this hotel series is about that.

The building that Ohla occupies today was not originally built with a department store in mind. It was erected by the architect Joan Roig i Solé between 1924 and 1926 as a block of ground-floor apartments, seven floors and an eighth for service, promoted by Heribert Salas and Gloria Bilbena. It was the owners of Vilardell who, attracted by the location (a crossroads that treads on the path of the old Roman aqueduct and the ancient palace of Wilfred the Hairy, no less, although by now this hardly surprises anyone in this city), bought the basement, the ground floor, and the first floor. To customize it, they called Eusebi Bona i Puig, a professor at the School of Architecture and also the author of the La Unión y el Fénix Español building on Passeig de Gràcia, to convert those floors into their headquarters.

The lodge under the dome

At the very top, crowning the building, there is a detail that seems taken from a light novel, one of those read on the beach: two floors topped with a dome, which are said (never confirmed, and perhaps better that way) to have housed a Masonic lodge. While downstairs the business did everything possible to be seen, a few meters above, the exact opposite was done. Total discretion. This is the first twist of the chapter, and it's the one I like the most: the same building that learns to look out onto the street hides something in its head that prefers not to be looked at by anyone. Today that head is an enormous suite. A good way to close the circle... because it is supposed that discretion must also prevail in that suite.

A department store

Magatzems Vilardell opened its headquarters on September 21, 1928, taking advantage of the momentum of the Mercè festivities. La Vanguardia announced the inauguration a day before. The city, then obsessed with its department stores as if they were modern temples of consumption (shortly after, very close by, El Siglo, the other great commercial symbol of La Rambla which we already talked about in another chapter referring to the Manila and Meridien), received Casa Vilardell as a party within the party.

In the basement, the in-house tailoring workshop operated, where shirts and suits were cut and made. Over the years, especially after the Civil War, that section would become the house's hallmark. It is what those who worked or bought there remember most, and there are still a handful of people who remember it or have been told about it by their relatives. On the sales floor, moreover, there were panels that daily informed about the country's news. A modernity almost 100 years ago.

War did not spare even the temples of consumption. In 1938, with Barcelona under bombs, Vilardell published an advertisement that today is hard to read without being impressed: a drawing of planes about to bomb the city, inviting people to keep buying, almost as if it were an act of patriotism. The address on that advertisement was Via Durruti, a name Laietana briefly held until 1939. During the conflict, the company was collectivized, passing into the hands of its own workers, and in the early 1940s, it became private again. It lasted several more decades, until it definitively closed in 1980.

From sales to ID cards

When the department store closed, the building did not remain empty for long: it came to house offices of the National Police and a citizen office for the issuance of passports and national identity documents. A clarification, because saying Via Laietana and Police evokes certain things and it is not advisable to mix stories: this building is not the sadly famous Headquarters (at number 43), headquarters of the Political-Social Brigade during Francoism. They are different things, although the building did have to house administrative offices of a police building that had become too small.

The residents who remained on the upper floors of number 49 were evicted and, after its police phase, the building was almost entirely demolished. Only what still stands today was preserved: the cataloged facade, which the Alonso, Balaguer i Arquitectos Asociados studio literally left suspended in the air, on a provisional structure for an entire year, while three new floors were excavated: one for meeting rooms and hotel services, another for parking, and the last, without any glamour, though fundamental, for storage and technical services.

Amat's thousand eyes

Here Frederic Amat enters the story. On that preserved facade, the sculptor performed what he himself calls acupuncture: a thousand steel needles topped with ceramic eyes, driven one by one, forming a kind of constellation that looks towards the streets. "My intervention is born from the will for a correspondence of gazes," Amat said at the time, between the work, the hotel guests, and the people who simply pass through one of Barcelona's densest streets, lately a little quieter, with widened sidewalks and limited traffic. A dance of irises, he called it. Beautiful, yes. A bit pretentious too, not to deny it.

There are those who prefer to read those eyes in another, more earthly way: surveillance, protection, an echo of all that this building has looked at and been looked at during the last century. The two readings coexist on the same facade without quarreling. Which is, after all, what this building has done all its life.

The project architects explained that the challenge did not end at the historic facade. It was necessary to make it "dialogue" with a second skin, darker and newer, raised towards Comtal street, thus stitching together two streets that until then had turned their backs on each other. This dialogue between old and new continues to play, in some way, with the idea of the gaze: the floor plan is almost circular, so no two rooms are alike either in distribution or in views, distributed between the Palau de la Música, the stretch of port at the end of Via Laietana or the narrow streets of Ciutat Vella.

Just below the dome that was once associated with the lodge, a duplex suite with very high ceilings opens onto the terrace and pool that look towards Comtal: a true fifth facade, with 360-degree views over the city. Even in the mezzanine restaurant there is a steel mesh filter with LEDs that allows you to see the street without being seen from it. Another turn, already in the 21st century, in the game of looking and being looked at that this building carries with it.

Today, Ohla is a 72-room boutique hotel spread over six floors, with a Michelin Star for years at its Caelis restaurant and a rooftop pool from which the view goes, unhurriedly, from the sea to Tibidabo. Whoever crosses Via Laietana and looks up will find the usual: a building that, in one way or another, has never stopped looking.

Since it became a hotel, it does so with a thousand eyes.