‘Like living in the Sagrada Familia’: inside newly renovated Casa Burés, the eccentric, excessive Catalan home

As the evening light fades in Barcelona, the spotlights go on in Casa Burés in the city’s elegant Eixample district where a team of artisans are labouring long into the night.

Fresh from working on the renovation of the Liceu opera house on the Ramblas, the wonderfully named Gisela Bosom is painstakingly restoring the fairytale murals that cover every wall of Casa Burés old playroom, including a scene from Hansel and Gretel around a huge carved stone hearth. Her colleague, Silvia Llobet, is recreating an original mosaic floor, laying one tiny tile at a time.

There are 300,000 of them in total in the building, each individually numbered and sitting in plastic pots. In another apartment, craftsmen are perched on ladders delicately reviving ornate cornicing on the high ceilings.