A nineteenth-century Eixample mansion on Carrer de Mallorca, its cream stucco facade articulated with wrought-iron balconettes and classical pediments that Ildefons Cerdà's grid was designed to accommodate, provides Alma Barcelona with a structural identity that no amount of contemporary intervention could manufacture from scratch. The building's six storeys carry the measured authority of Barcelona's bourgeois expansion era, and the hotel — which holds 72 rooms across the original structure and a more restrained modern wing visible to the left of the facade — works carefully to honour that inheritance without becoming a period piece. Inside, the tension between the building's nineteenth-century bones and a thoroughly contemporary design sensibility resolves itself through material discipline rather than contrast. Herringbone oak floors ground the rooms, paired with slate-toned upholstered headboards, copper-inlaid joinery panels, and layered kilim rugs whose worn pigments warm the otherwise cool palette. The double-height lobby lounge, its upper mezzanine framed in dark-stained timber and draped with large-format hanging artwork, carries the atmosphere of a private members' club in a former private house — velvet sofas in dusty blue, low tables, curtained restaurant beyond. The rear garden terrace, screened by mature eucalyptus and boxwood, shifts the register entirely: white linen, magenta blooms, dappled afternoon light — a hidden courtyard that earns its keep as one of the more genuinely civilised dining spaces in the neighbourhood.

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