Antiga Casa Buenavista

Antiga Casa Buenavista

El Raval is the neighbourhood that Barcelona's other neighbourhoods have historically looked down on and that visitors who know the city have always preferred. Immediately west of the Rambla, it was for centuries the city's most densely populated quarter, a place of workshops, convents, hospitals and later, as the port grew, of sailors and immigrants and the kind of street life that more orderly cities don't produce. The MACBA, Richard Meier's white contemporary art museum, arrived in 1995 and changed the conversation without changing the neighbourhood's fundamental character, which is still one of the most genuinely mixed and visually interesting in Barcelona. The Ronda de Sant Antoni runs along the northern edge of El Raval, marking its boundary with the Eixample, a wide boulevard lined with elegant balconied buildings that functions as one of the city's better evening circuits, its pavement cafés and wine bars drawing a crowd that is more local than tourist and more interesting for it. The Boqueria is a short walk south. The Gothic Quarter is across the Rambla. Passeig de Gràcia is ten minutes north. Antiga Casa Buenavista was founded in 1918 as a family restaurant at Ronda de Sant Antoni 84, and the restaurant is what it built its reputation on across the first century of its existence. The building was converted into a hotel recently, and what has emerged is one of the more confident boutique openings in Barcelona in recent years: 43 rooms, all individually designed and all exterior-facing, some with balconies over the Ronda de Sant Antoni below. The design draws on a century of Barcelona's aesthetic vocabulary simultaneously, Catalan encaustic floor tiles and Art Nouveau mouldings from the building's origins, industrial ironwork and large windows from the neighbourhood's working history, mid-century pieces including Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs in the lounge, and contemporary restraint holding all of it together. The result is layered in a way that feels earned rather than assembled. Natura Bissé products in the bathrooms, Nespresso, Egyptian cotton, a rooftop pool reserved for hotel guests with views over the surrounding roofscape. The restaurant, Casa de Comidas, is the hotel's most important room. It serves traditional Catalan cooking, the grandma recipes that the building's first century of operation was built on, updated with contemporary technique and sourced locally. It draws locals as reliably as guests, which is the clearest possible signal that it is doing something right. The lounge, with its secluded antechambers and Barcelona chairs, is designed for lingering. The guests are younger and more culturally switched-on than the average Barcelona hotel crowd, people for whom El Raval's galleries and vintage shops and the MACBA courtyard are the natural daytime circuit, who will eat at the restaurant one night and at a Catalan wine bar around the corner the next, and who find the border between a working neighbourhood and the Eixample a more interesting address than either on its own. It is not a design hotel in the self-conscious sense. It is a hotel with a strong point of view that happens to be very well designed. The short version: A 43-room family-owned boutique hotel in a 1918 building on the Ronda de Sant Antoni, at the boundary of El Raval and the Eixample. Catalan floor tiles, Art Nouveau mouldings and mid-century furniture throughout, a restaurant serving traditional Catalan cooking that draws locals as reliably as guests, and a rooftop pool for hotel guests only. Eight minutes from Plaça Catalunya, five from the MACBA. The culturally curious Barcelona address, for people who find the border between a working neighbourhood and a grand boulevard more interesting than either on its own.