Gaudi's Palau Guell is the unsung hero of Barcelona's heritage sights

Sure as you'll eat a lot of tapas, when in Barcelona you'll see long queues tailing back from the doors of Gaudi's La Segrada Familia, La Pedrera and Casa Batllo.  Puzzlingly, you won't find them at Palau Guell, another Gaudi-designed building that, to my taste, is the best of all his domestic architecture.

The Guell Palace is just off the Rambla, a short walk from the Boqueria Market.  If anything, it's closer to the main tourist flight path, and therefore more convenient, than the the more famous buildings.  There are other reasons it should be higher on the tourist hit list.

It was his first significant, complete house design, created in his mid-30s.  You can see both the young genius, and the roots of the style that would stretch through his whole career.  It's the grandest and most complete of his domestic buildings open to the public. La Pedrera is an apartment building with only one middle-class dwelling restored and open (described in my entry last year), and Batllo is a house that had apartments on upper floors (not part of your tour).  Guell is an urban palace, all of its floors and rooms devoted to the life of one family, and all recently restored and laid open for you to wander about.

It's wonderful from the very beginning, when you're greeted by sinuous ironwork on the doors and come into a a ground floor that's essentially a big, integrated port cochere.  Carriages came in one side, and out the other.  Between them an impressive dark marble staircase ascending to the formal door.  (Pictured above.)  Behind that, a turning space and a circular ramp descending to basement stables, beautiful in their own right for their unusual brick columns.

The tour, which comes with an excellent audio guide, takes you from bottom to top.  First, the

processional entry that brought guests to the exquisite entertainment rooms.  Gaudi's naturalistic, modernist style is evident in tendrils of ironwork wrapping around light standards, early appearances of his catenary arches and the strange curves of wood and stone.  But there's more traditional Arts and Crafts style here in glazed tiles, faux Medieval carving, stained glass and impressive Arabic-style ceilings.  The most impressive room here is the central hall, at least three times higher than it was wide, creeping heavenward with those distinctive arches.  Gaudi punched holes in the dome to let light through, used a lot of gold, built in an organ and inset a gold-encrusted chapel on one side behind folding doors.  Party space, concert hall and heaven-looking church, all in one.

Then you get to clamber up to the family rooms, where the vine-and-leaf inspired decor around the arches of the master suite turns the rooms into an outdoor bower.  Though the house is mostly empty of furniture, the recent restoration places photos in many rooms showing what they were like when occupied.  Revealing an interesting truth about Gaudi.  Stripped down to the bare architecture, his rooms are exquisite.  Filled with late Victorian furniture, rugs, pot plants and ephemera, they're just too much.  I doubt any other architect has been done such a big favour by having his work emptied of its original furnishings.

Any good Gaudi building leads you to the roof.  The man was obsessed with bizarre chimney pots, after all, and the Guell Palace offers a riot of colour on a Disney scale.  More than anything else in the house, the roof points towards the dramatic departure from the norm that the rest of his work would take.  The finials of La Segrada Familia, still under construction today, are here at Palau Guell … finished 140 years ago.

I returned to that wonderful church, this time introducing it to Piers.  Interesting to see that things had changed just since my visit last year, with scaffolding removed from the main entry wall.  Last year, we visited on a gloomy, grey day.  This year, sun was pouring through the windows and the whole place showed off Gaudi's passion for using light as a design element.  We booked an hour long guided tour, which was well worth the extra money.

We also got to Casa Batllo, completing my triple crown of Gaudi domestic architecture.  In last year's coverage of my visit to La Pedrera, I speculated that the interiors down the street at Batllo might be more impressive.  And they were.

It's the colour scheme that blows you away here.  Gaudi wanted the whole place to feel like you were

living under water, so everything is done in shades of blue, white and green, and those trademark sinuous lines are now seaweed and waves.  The main sitting room with its undulating window frame overlooking the busy boulevard below is remarkable.  The roof is another blockbuster; along with crazy chimney pots you get a tiled roofline designed to look like a dragon.

The more I see of Gaudi, the more I love him.  I'm not sure I could live in his buildings full time, but if I get to choose my architect in heaven, he's designing my beach house.