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The Rafael Masó Foundation incorporates the furniture from the defunct Casa Omedes
The donation of the dining room ensemble, designed by Rafael Masó in 1924, recovers one of the most representative works of his Noucentista period and the evolution of his language towards Art Deco.
The Rafael Masó Foundation has incorporated into its collection one of the most significant pieces of furniture heritage linked to the Girona architect: the dining room set of the now-defunct Casa Omedes, designed by Rafael Masó at the end of 1924. The donation, made by the descendants of the Omedes family after more than a century of retaining ownership, includes eleven original pieces - the table, five chairs, two armchairs, a coffee table, the sideboard and the display case -, in addition to a small wooden frame carved by Adolf Fargnoli, a regular collaborator of the architect.
The furniture was conceived as part of a comprehensive project for Casa Omedes, a single-family residence built between 1924 and 1925 on Carrer de Sant Antoni Maria Claret in Girona by order of the industrialist Pere Omedes. Although the building was demolished in 1970, the furniture set has been preserved in its entirety and today constitutes an exceptional testimony to the global conception of architecture and interior design that Masó defended.
The Omedes House occupies a prominent place in the architect's career. Built at a time marked by the political repression of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship —which led to Masó's imprisonment and disqualification from undertaking public works—, it also coincides with the start of his urban development project in S'Agaró. According to scholars Joan Tarrús and Narcís Comadira, this building represents one of the clearest manifestations of the assimilation of Art Deco into Masó's architectural language, thanks to a rigorous composition, the refined use of materials and a special chromatic sensitivity.
The dining room furniture also reflects this stage of creative maturity. Its forms synthesize the evolution that Masó had experienced from the first furniture influenced by modernism to the noucentista proposals inspired by the Viennese Secession and the Arts and Crafts movement. In the 1920s, this language incorporates references to both Catalan popular baroque and Art Deco, before gradually approaching rationalism during the following decade.
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