The space where you live has to make you feel good, protect you, not live for the house. Let it be dismantled, let it be dismantled. With the children I have it very clear: they have to enjoy it, and if something breaks, then that’s what it is,” explains Cósima Güell.
And his house is very welcoming. He lives in what was the park of the Torre Castanyer family estate, in Barcelona’s Bonanova, in a rationalist house from 1966 that his grandparents commissioned from Xavier Busquets, also author of the Col • legi d’ Arquitectes de Catalunya in Barcelona. Original furniture by the architect coexists with classic and contemporary art, mid-century lamps by K.H Kinsky, fabrics by Güell Lamadrid, ceramics by Manises, a daybed rescued from the La Balsa restaurant and layers of memory that exude authenticity. Large floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the garden where his three sons, Tristan, Felix and Frankie, play.
Cósima, descendant of Eusebi Güell, patron and friend of Gaudí, studied Dramatic Art and Interior Design. She has a name that sounds like music and an aura that smells of cypress, thyme, and natural essences from Rassa Botanicals, the holistic cosmetics brand that she confused with her aunt Sandra Dualde and Nat San Martín.
“I like to mix eras and pieces and I like to find things,” explains Cósima, who has a special sensitivity for fabrics. “In my world there have always been fabrics since I was a child, the one in the dining room was put up by my grandmother and it made me nostalgic to take it off, because when I was little I spent a lot of time in this house.” Now the exuberant flowers and pheasants coexist with Thonet chairs, a Coderch lamp and another from Santa
The house has two floors, connected by a spiral staircase in the style of Alvar Aalto and with a functionalist distribution. On the upper floor are the bedrooms, which open onto a terrace that runs along the entire façade, made of white exposed brick and wooden balustrade. Busquets opted for pure forms, with sensitive attention to the environment, natural light and construction details such as sliding slats and brise-soleils, recurring in his work.
“My grandmother Memé López de Lamadrid received us every Saturday and Sunday with a great buffet. 20 of us would get together to eat -Cósima remembers-. Now, in the summers in Comillas we continue to get together, the Güell side and the López side of Madrid after many generations.” And what is it like to have such recognized surnames? “It’s wonderful, because Güell has a super-powerful cultural legacy but it is also overwhelming because you think: what have I done in life compared to these great ancestors? It is a pride but also a challenge.”
He explains that his father, Javier Güell – orchestra director – chose his name after Wagner’s second wife and daughter of Franz Lisz, and that he spent months thinking about what music would be the first that his newborn daughter would listen to. In the end she decided on the second movement of Mozart’s violin and viola concerto. Regarding her mother, Águeda Viñamata, a professor of Art History, believes that the complicity that exists between a mother and a daughter is special, “although girls are also much more demanding and critical of mothers than boys. We argue more.” She considers hers “an absolute reference. She is very strong and I admire her for her energy. I always listen to what she tells me; She is the woman I trust the most. When they say to me: Cósima, you remind me of Águeda, that is the compliment that makes me most excited.”
To educate her children, she follows the two pieces of advice that pediatrician Félix Omeñaca gave her: to play classical music for them and to teach them how to play chess when they are a little older. Tristán, the eldest, is looking forward to having his grandfather visit him to play some games.
Tristán and Félix have only been together for 14 months: “That was every man for himself. It was almost as if they were twins, but more difficult, because you had a bottle with one size, a bottle with another, a diaper of such size, a diaper of that size, one was already sitting, the other was a baby… Tristan is more intellectual and reflective, Félix is ??the most athletic in the family, pure energy. Then the little one arrived, who is the joy of the house and manages his brothers as he wants. His name is Francisco after his father and also after my uncle Frankie Sert.” The space in the house that the three of them like the most is the garden, with a trampoline to jump on.
Cósima worked in interior design studios, and in London she founded a service that found houses for expatriates. She also participated in the creation of the online furniture flash sale company Mimub. After her second child was born, she returned to Barcelona and founded Cala Living, a home textiles company. Her careful designs could not compete with fast food interior design brands. As an actress she has explored Shakespeare and Chekhov and performed a text by Yukio Mishima at the Venice Biennale – “acting should be a subject in school, because it gives fundamental skills for life,” she believes. For three years she has been dedicated to Rassa Botanicals: “Care also has to go through emotions. It is good to take care of the exterior, but the interesting thing is to take care of the interior, which is reflected in the exterior.”
As she gets older, Cósima becomes “much more aware that what I want is to be with my loved ones and create memories and experiences. I know I live in a great house and it may sound incongruous, but I try not to care about material things, because really what you have left in the end are the experiences with your loved ones.”
That is why he defends that “your house is your house, it is your experiences, your scars, your life story. I have furniture from my London days, from my trips to Paris. Photographs of my relatives, classical paintings, drawings by my father’s wife, a bas-relief from the San Fernando Academy that they gave us when we got married.” Also a sofa with patches on the seats that has not been reupholstered “because things have to have a patina, there is no need to have everything so new and so perfect, because that is not elegant at all.”
