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Meimagine living in a large, beautiful home designed by one of the world’s most famous architects in a very expensive street Spain and the one you pay the insulting rent, and the right to live there until you die.
Meet writer Ana Viladomiu, 70, the last tenant of Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Milà on Barcelona’s beautiful Passeig de Gràcia. Viladomiu is the last tenant in any of Gaudí’s buildings, unless you include the niches that occupy the Sagrada Família.
So what’s it like being the only person in a house that receives nearly a million visitors a year?
Viladomiu said about the beautiful house where he raised his two daughters, he says: “I got used to all the guests.
“Obviously I can’t take out the trash in my pajamas because people take pictures or ask me if I’m a woman who lives upstairs, as if I’m a decent person. That’s part of my life.
The house belonged to her husband, Fernando Amat, the owner of the Vinçon department store, similar to the Conran store in London, which closed in 2015. Viladomiu moved to Amat in 1988.
Although Viladomiu does not disclose the rent he pays, he has what is known as a old renta permanent contract, with the right to live there until he and Amat (from whom they separated) die, at which time the non-profit foundation that has run the building since 2013 will take ownership. These types of contracts stopped being issued in 1985, but about 100,000 still exist throughout Spain.
Viladomiu said: “When I moved there there was a lot of life, a lot of neighbors. “At that time the building was bought by Caixa Catalunya bank, which bought generous tenants to renovate the building. I don’t know why they didn’t give us a chance. We joke that they want us to stay here as attractions, like Snowflake, Barcelona’s famous albino gorilla.”
Caixa Catalunya ceased trading as a bank in 2010 and merged with two other failed banks to form a non-profit foundation that now oversees La Pedrera. The rest of the building is now used for offices, while other spaces are used for cultural events such as concerts.
Casa Milà, famously – and derogatorily – known as La Pedrera (the stone house) was commissioned by Pedro Milà and Rosario Segimon, who inherited the great fortune his father made in the coffee trade in Guatemala. The construction of the building was completed in 1910 and, like many of Gaudí’s works, it was ridiculed, in part because it resembled a cobblestone.
The building has been a UNESCO heritage site since 1984 and has passed through different hands. At the beginning of the Spanish civil war in 1936 the Trotskyist and Socialist parties placed themselves at the bottom; where over the years La Pedrera housed a bingo hall, estate agents, diplomats and an Egyptian prince.
The Viladomiu building is not only large but, like all Gaudí buildings, it is also light, with curved, curved sculptures and balconies where the metal produces the appearance of animals and marine animals.
After Gaudí’s death in 1926, Segimon shocked the world of architecture when he tore down or hid many of the originals in his first room, the most beautiful in the building, and redecorated it like Louis XVI.
Surprisingly, Viladomiu says there are no rules about what changes he can make to the house, but adds that he won’t allow changes to anything, not even old brass clocks. And, he says, everything still works.
He also asked many former tenants to describe what became a fictional history, now published in English as Last Borrower.
“The book is fiction, but everything in it about La Pedrera is real,” he says. “It started as a series of interviews with people who used to make rent, but a journalist friend said: ‘You have to tell the story in the first person, as well as the story of your family.'”
In the book and in real life, various famous people passed through the building, among them the architect Zaha Hadid, the former mayor of Barcelona and the Catalan president Pasqual Maragall and the fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier.
She said: “I met Gaultier on the way down. I had my hands full of orange bags and he was looking at everything with great interest.
2026 marks the 100th anniversary of Gaudí’s death; when in June the pope will visit Barcelona to bless the recently completed tower of Jesus Christ in Gaudí’s masterpiece, the Sagrada Família. Meanwhile, Viladomiu remains a living reminder that most of what Gaudí built was not for tourists, but for people to live in.
