“From the garden at the back, I don’t know why we called it the orchard, a fig tree grew majestically.” “At the foot of this fig tree, there were piles of stones that must have been leftover from the construction of the monument, old bricks, and construction debris from work that had been done on the house, which my grandfather kept, because, he said, they might be useful someday.” (Mercè Rodoreda, neighbor from the Farró)
Les Mont-rogenques has been emerging from accompanying Mercè Rodoreda’s characters, who walk the streets of the Farró, resonating a way of life disappeared, made of small gardens with fig and pomegranate trees, wisteria, trellised rose bushes, hydrangeas planted in wooden buckets; roofs with turrets and railings adorned with geraniums; dining rooms with iron lamps full of flowers and dragons, and finished with red trimmings; the glass door, with a thousand colored glasses, which leads to the back garden. Houses where the relationships between neighbors were, for better and also for worse, like those of a big family.
The project aims to revive and recover those lost essences of the everyday life of the neighborhood. However, far from wanting to become a museum-like space, Les Mont-rogenques is a play of interconnected flexible rooms that allow for the creation of spaces to live in different ways and easily adaptable, without pre-established or hierarchical uses. Each space, however, has its own unique idiosyncrasy, stemming from the textures, colors, light, and various traces we have uncovered beneath the different historical layers of the house, which coexist harmoniously with the new inhabitants.
“The large room was on the first floor of the tower where the two teachers lived with their mother and a brother. The room was very spacious and had many windows. Next to it, as large as the room, was the cloakroom, and above the coats, a row of hooks where we hung the cushions to make lace. At the back of this room, there was a door that led to a covered gallery, and to one side, the bathrooms. I liked to go there to stay for a while in the gallery with my nose pressed against the glass, looking at towers and gardens.” (Mercè Rodoreda, neighbor from the Farró)
