Casa Lleó Morera

On a winter day in 1902, a woman named Francesca Morera did something quietly decisive: she assigned Lluís Domènech i Montaner to remodel an older house on this corner—an ancient “casa Rocamora,” built in 1864. What began as renovation work became, in a remarkably short span of time, one of the city’s most concentrated statements of Catalan modernisme, the kind of architecture where building and decoration behave like a single organism.

A house remade in modernisme

The result became Casa Lleó Morera, standing on the corner of Carrer del Consell de Cent near Passeig de Gràcia. It was one of the three emblematic buildings of Barcelona’s Illa de la Discòrdia—the “Block of Discord”—and, unusually, it was the only house in that block to win the city’s Arts Building Annual Award (Concurso anual de edificios artísticos), in 1906. Morera did not live to see the later acclaim. She died in 1904, and the building was named after her son, Albert Lleó i Morera. Over time, it also became known for another identity entirely: it was the residence of Cuban-Catalan photographer Pau Audouard.

An atelier, not a single architect

Domènech i Montaner did not work alone here.