‘It’s a world heritage site, but it’s my home’: the last resident of Casa Milà on life in Gaudí’s masterwork

I magine that you live in an enormous, beautiful apartment designed by one of the world’s most admired architects in the most expensive street in Spain and for which you pay a derisory rent, with the right to live there until you die. Meet the writer Ana Viladomiu, 70, the last tenant of Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Milà on the elegant Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona. Viladomiu is in fact the last tenant in any of Gaudí’s buildings, unless you include the peregrine falcons that nest in the Sagrada Família. So what’s it like being the sole occupant of a building that receives about a million visitors a year? “I’m used to all the visitors. It’s a world heritage site, but it’s my home and has been for almost 40 years,” Viladomiu says of the luminous apartment where she raised her two daughters, both of them now architects. Ana Viladomiu: ‘I know it’s a privilege to live here.’ Photograph: Jordi Matas/The Guardian “Obviously, I can’t take the rubbish out in my pyjamas because people take photos or ask me if I’m the woman who lives upstairs, like I’m a character. That’s part of my life. But I know it’s a privilege to live here.” The apartment belonged to her husband, Fernando Amat, owner of the much-lamented designer store Vinçon, akin to the Conran store in London, which closed in 2015. Viladomiu moved in with Amat in 1988. …