The journey of Gaudí’s Batlló chair: Casa Valle’s redesign captivates US audiences

Since 2012, the NYCxDesign Festival has brought together the best of design from various fields, including interior, industrial, architectural, graphic, and urban design. From May 15 to 20, kicking off with a party at the former Domino Sugar Factory, an iconic building in Williamsburg, numerous design-related events, conferences, and exhibitions were spread throughout New York City’s neighborhoods. One of the most exciting offerings was Casa Valle, an award-winning design studio founded by editor and former style director of Architectural Digest, Jane Keltner, and architect Giancarlo Valle: a redesign of Gaudí’s Batlló chair.

Keltner and Valle married in 2010 and have been a creative couple since opening their joint project, Casa Valle, in 2024. This year, they collaborated for the first time at NYCxDesign. At the fair, they presented 50 replicas of the chair, faithful to the original edition — handcrafted by artisans in Barcelona using the same methods and materials — but with the unique ebony-stained finish. The price of these replicas, so far, remains a mystery.

The Batlló chair, designed in 1906, is a unique piece that reflects not only Antoni Gaudí‘s genius for expressing beauty, but also how ahead of his time he was. He had already designed it in the 19th century with an ergonomic style that adapted to the human body and prioritized functionality, long before such concepts became popular. More than a simple chair, it is a fluid and organic work, where the screw connections between the pieces are invisible, as if by magic, giving the impression that the wood has naturally adopted that shape.

“It’s a curious dichotomy, because Gaudí’s architecture has become almost a Disneyland-style tourist attraction, but his furniture designs remain completely unique. There’s an elegance and rigor to his pieces that sometimes gets lost in the surface noise,” Valle and Keltner explain via email, emphasizing that, while Gaudí’s work is in some ways highly recognized, there’s also a side that remains undiscovered. “His furniture, for example, has never been brought to the United States. We’re honored and excited to be able to share it with the design community now in New York.”

The chair was part of the furniture in Casa Batlló, a building on Barcelona’s Passeig de Gràcia that Gaudí remodeled at the request of Josep Batlló, a wealthy textile businessman, and which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005. The dreamlike design of the house and its furniture was inspired by a marine world intertwined with fantasy, seemingly taken from a childhood imagination, or from Jules Verne’s novel, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

A colorful roof simulating scales, an undulating façade evoking ocean waves, with a main staircase carved in hardwood like the spine of a marine animal, railings resembling fishing nets, and catenary arches in the attic that give the impression of being inside the belly of a cetacean.

As Dalí once said: “Gaudí built a house based on the shapes of the sea, representing the waves on a calm day. A true sculpture of the reflections of twilight clouds in the water, from which emerge the forms of extended water, forms of extending water, forms of stagnant water, forms of mirroring water, and forms of water rippled by the wind.”

Valle, a Princeton graduate with a career that has earned him a spot on the prestigious AD100 global list — which recognizes the world’s one hundred most influential studios, architects, and interior designers — brings an international sensibility forged since childhood: the son of Peruvian parents of Italian descent, he grew up between the United States (San Francisco, Chicago) and Latin America (Caracas).

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