A Slow Stay
Casa Bonay occupies a Neoclassical residence of 1869 on Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, in the Dreta de l'Eixample — the quieter, more residential half of Barcelona's grid, set apart from the crowds of the Rambla. The Brooklyn studio Studio Tack restored it in 2016, keeping the bones of the old house intact: hydraulic-tile floors, a marble stair, arched doorways and the original wooden doors.
It is less a hotel than a meeting place — a building that fills, through the course of a day, with Barcelona's own. Coffee in the morning, work in the lounge, cocktails after dark, the rooftop in summer. Almost everything in it is made nearby: bed throws woven by the social enterprise Teixadors, prints by the design collective BaTabasTa. The city is sourced into the rooms.
The renovation was an act of restraint. Studio Tack preserved what the nineteenth-century house already had — patterned hydraulic floors, plasterwork, generous ceiling heights — and added only what was missing: contemporary lighting, Catalan textiles, simple custom furniture. Nothing is grand; everything is considered. The result feels less designed than gently brought back to life.
Sixty-seven rooms, all soundproofed against the Gran Via, range from compact Courtyard Doubles that look onto the building's planted light-well to larger rooms and suites with their own terraces over the city. Each keeps its original mosaic floor and pairs it with a bespoke woven throw, good lighting and a small shelf of books chosen by a local bookshop. The smallest are genuinely small — the point is less the room than everything that surrounds it downstairs and above.
The ground floor belongs to Libertine — a bar and lounge beneath industrial columns and oversized bronze-framed mirrors, where natural wines, highballs and the kitchen of Bodega Bonay carry the day from breakfast into the evening, often with a DJ in the corner. In the lobby, Satan's Coffee Corner pours single-origin coffee from early. It is the kind of place locals treat as an office, a living room and a bar in the course of a single day.
Up top is the reason to book in summer: a planted roof terrace with a small pool, a chiringuito bar and a long view across the rooftops of the Eixample. Termas Bonay, an open-air wellness room with a sauna, hammam, ice bath and a Japanese furo, sits up here too — taken in fifty-minute sessions, a few people at a time. The noise of the street falls away completely.
The Dreta de l'Eixample is Barcelona at its most liveable. Gaudí's Sagrada Família and Casa Batlló are within a walk, but so are the everyday cafés, bookshops and food markets the guidebooks skip. Passeig de Gràcia and its line of modernista facades is ten minutes on foot; the Gothic Quarter and the sea, twenty. The metro at Tetuan is a minute from the door.
Indicative rates — vary by season and availability. Breakfast typically extra. Confirm directly with the hotel for current pricing.
Reserve at Casa Bonay
