Beneath a glass-and-steel pavilion added atop its nineteenth-century limestone facade, the Claris Hotel & Spa GL on Carrer del Pau Claris pulls off one of Barcelona's more quietly audacious architectural conjunctions. The base structure is the Palau Vedruna, an 1892 neoclassical palace whose pedimented windows, figurative stone carvings, and rusticated ground floor survive intact along the Eixample streetline — while the upper two floors were rebuilt as a transparent modern addition housing the rooftop pool deck, restaurant, and garden terraces. That pool level, lined with hardwood decking and latticed steel sunloungers, surveys the Dreta de l'Eixample's octagonal block grid from a perch the original architects could not have imagined. Inside, the 124 rooms pursue a different kind of layering. Some carry gold-leaf coffered ceilings and burnished amber headboards that give the atmosphere of a Japoniste cabinet; others expose sections of original fresco beneath dark-framed four-poster beds, their aged-mirror wardrobe panels doubling the soft light from sheer linen curtains. The rooftop restaurant extends under a billowing tensile canopy above a living green wall thick with monstera and palm, white powder-coated wire chairs pulled up to white-clothed tables on layered indigo rugs — a composition that manages, somehow, to feel like a garden rather than a hotel amenity. Throughout, the Claris treats its own antiquity not as a constraint but as raw material.

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