The hotel in Barcelona where everything that is modern comes together

A hotel that is a house.

A bar that is an office.

A restaurant that is a nightclub.

A neighbor who is a customer.

And a client who can already be considered a neighbor.

Opened in 2016, the Casa Bonay hotel has since then sought to achieve all of this, which has been the holy grail of contemporary hospitality for over a decade.

Tearing down the walls of the last frontier, that of hotels, spaces that for centuries have been valued more for their ability to withdraw from the city that houses them than for merging with it.

And once those walls are knocked down, turning the hotel open to the city into something real, not another phrase to use and throw away when fashion presents a new obviousness.

The floor at the entrance to the hotel and the Libertine bar itself, where customers, neighbors, onlookers and digital nomads mingle, is made of the same pavement as the sidewalks of L'Eixample where it is located.

The neighborhood enters to the heart of the establishment.

If under the cobblestones of Paris the sixty-year-olds guessed the beach, under Casa Bonay are the streets of Barcelona.

"And they go all the way", intervenes Irene Miró-Sans (Barcelona, ​​39 years old), founder of the establishment.

“I wanted a space where my friends could feel comfortable, a place that wasn't intimidating, where when you entered there wasn't a counter with people watching you.

Opening up to the city, but really, because this concept has been messed around a lot and, in Barcelona at least, I think only the Omm hotel managed to achieve it”.

Inés Miró-Sans, on the stairs of Casa Bonay, in Barcelona.

Rita Puig-Serra Costa

Wall paper created by the Batabasta studio.

Rita Puig-Serra Costa

Casa Bonay is located in a building from 1869. The walls are imperfect, the measurements not always easy to take.

But if the pavement of the city had to be under the hotel, at its heart the spirit of the bourgeois Barcelona of the 19th century that pervades this right side of L'Eixample had to be maintained.

The rooms were going to be medium or even small in size (approximately 20 square meters), but the common spaces were spacious and decorated with a kind of harmonious eclecticism.

If there was no place to put a pool, a shower was put.

It was a house in which to receive visitors.

Now, over the years, the hostess has, in a way, matured.

“Even now I want to have bigger rooms, with more things, even a bar inside, because maybe we are more of parties in

when we get older.

I loved traveling around Europe to those hostels with 15 people per room and to those bars where everything happened.

In fact, my first project, the germ of all this, was a hostel in Ciutat Vella with a bar called Pa amb Tomàquet”, recalls the hostess, who is now also committed to the possibility of working from inside the room, not from the bar

In the hotel there is a resident who moved to work from here with the pandemic, despite having a flat in nearby Poble Nou.

And there it goes.

The client as a source of inspiration.

Nica is a versatile space of 500 square meters that is part of Casa Bonay.

It is divided into two areas: the first, Nica Bar, which is ideal for intimate celebrations, and the second, Nica Meetings, for work meetings, product presentations or shootings.

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The Bodega Bonay restaurant.

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In the project that Miró-Sans is forging together with his team in the Empordà and which is scheduled to open in 2024, it includes the option of renting entire winter seasons to work from there.

“Although the spirit of the space is really focused on

We will have a 45-minute spa circuit that will be done in private and surrounded by vegetation.

No jets and chlorine everywhere.”

Room door by Max and Ausias.

The Do not disturb, designed by Querida Studio.Rita Puig-Serra Costa

Room with private terrace.

Furniture designed, together with Marc Morro, by AOO.Rita Puig-Serra Costa

She feels that in the Empordà, where she is going to open, there is almost as much to do as in L'Eixample, where Casa Bonay was located more than five years ago.

"I fell in love with the neighborhood, but then there was almost nothing of what there is now," says Miró-Sans regarding an area that has undergone a quiet transformation, not too loud, at least by the standards of a city in which there are as much tendency to criticize the new as to criticize those who criticize the new.

Barcelona wins when its people tie.

And Casa Bonay has always tried to be very much from the city, with its lighting by Santa & Cole, the blankets by Teixidors, the shop set up together with those responsible for Apartamento Magazine, the readings proposed by Jan Martí from Blackie Books or the furniture by Marc Nose.

Hotel reception, from which you can access The Store, the Apartamento Magazine store. Rita Puig-Serra Costa

Facade of the Bonay family building, at 700 Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes in Barcelona.

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"When we started there was a lot of desire for everything, then things got very complicated and now I feel that we are aligned again in this city," says Miró-Sans.

"The problem continues to be how to achieve that model of quality tourism that everyone says they want but that seems very difficult to define."

What was really hard for her to define was the Casa Bonay restaurant.

“It was a bit of a drama, I'm not going to lie to you.

I think we started with a project with natural wines and matured meats that, I don't know, seven years ago, was still not understood”.

Then they allied with those of Xemei, another totem of Barcelona in the last decade.

But it didn't finish curdling either.

Now, at Bodega, the latest reincarnation of the restaurant, chef Giacomo Hassan is committed to local things and things have finally clicked.

“It is that when someone came and told me:

'Well, my mother-in-law went to eat at the hotel and…'.

Ugh, she made me shake.

Now, well, I think we could even consider opening something in Madrid if the right location is found.

We are prepared for everything and I think that the people are also prepared for us.

We moved a lot by skin and now we have learned to do it with skin and head”.

The lighting is by Santa & Cole, and the general design project, by the New Yorkers Studio Tack.

Rita Puig-Serra Costa