Flowers by Bornay : la nature pour architecture 

There’s a question Flowers by Bornay has spent years answering by hand: what happens when nature ceases to be inspiration and becomes art? In the world of this Barcelona-based atelier, flowers are never just decoration. They’re raw material, language and architecture.

“No one invents anything, because everything is already written in nature,” said Antoni Gaudí. “Originality consists of returning to the origin.” Like Gaudí, Joan Xapelli (Barcelona, 1976), founder of Flowers by Bornay, begins with the organic world to arrive at forms that challenge convention. Textures that recall scales. Structures that evoke the gladius of a squid, the geometry of coral, the iridescent skin of a sea creature.

For years, La Roca Village has been opening doors to Barcelona’s creative community. In 2026, with the city recognised as the UNESCO World Capital of Architecture, that commitment to local creativity takes physical form. For ‘A Doorway to Barcelona’, the creative team at Flowers by Bornay took the monumental wrought-iron doors of La Pedrera as their starting point.

Their proposal is an artistic installation that transforms Gaudí’s visual language into large-scale wooden structures, meticulously covered in petals by the atelier’s artisans, like the scales of a fantastical creature. The technique directly references the ceramic tile assemblage of Casa Batlló’s roof – now reimagined in artificial flower form. A trompe-l’œil suspended between reality and imagination; a flower that appears alive, yet belongs entirely to the realm of fantasy.

“We artisans are the ones who will survive AI,” Joan reflects. At its essence, the work of Flowers by Bornay resembles that of a haute couture atelier. Every petal is hand-cut. Every piece is placed with the same precision and care with which Parisian plumassières embroider feathers onto the creations of the great fashion houses. There are no shortcuts, no mechanical repetition. There are hours spent in the studio. Failed experiments. The moment when an unexpected combination reveals something entirely new.

The colour palette draws directly from the stained-glass windows of the Sagrada Família: volcanic orange dahlias, blue delphinium, lisianthus and hydrangeas in shades of green. Each species is selected not for generic beauty, but for what it allows Flowers by Bornay to create: the dahlia petal, with its texture and scale, becomes the perfect fragment in a mosaic that never repeats itself in quite the same way. “The dahlia itself,” Joan explains, “contains its own trencadís (mosaic).”

The result isn’t a literal tribute. It’s a metamorphosis. A new interpretation of a body of work we believed we already knew, through a material Gaudí never used, yet one that somehow feels as though it had always been waiting there.