The Rafael Masó Foundation Receives the Donation of the Dining Room Furniture from Casa Omedes, Designed by Rafael Masó

Thursday, August 6, 2026

The furniture ensemble is representative of Masó's work from the 1920s, produced at the height of the Noucentisme movement.

The Rafael Masó Foundation has received a major donation: the complete set of furniture that Rafael Masó designed for the dining room of Casa Omedes in Girona at the end of 1924. The donation comprises eleven pieces: the dining table, five chairs, two armchairs, a side table, a sideboard and a display cabinet. It also includes a small carved wooden frame by Adolf Fargnoli, one of Masó's regular collaborators. For more than a century, this furniture ensemble has remained in the possession of the descendants of the Omedes family, who originally commissioned Masó.

The furniture was designed when Masó was commissioned to build a new house for Pere Omedes, a prominent industrialist from Girona and Sarrià de Ter. Casa Omedes, located on Carrer de Sant Antoni M. Claret in Girona, was a single-storey terraced house with a rear garden, built between May 1924 and February 1925. The L-shaped garden extended to Carrer de Juli Garreta, where a garage was subsequently built as the ground floor of a projected apartment building. Casa Omedes was demolished in 1970.

Pere Omedes i Clivillé was a leading entrepreneur and landowner in the Girona region, best known for his cement and hydraulic lime factories and his gypsum kilns in Sant Julià de Ramis, Sarrià de Ter and Sant Daniel. He also served as mayor of Sant Julià and was a patron of the Coral La Joventut de Sarrià choir and the town's Floral Games. He sat on the governing boards of the Agricultural Chamber, the Agricultural Trade Federation and Unió Esportiva Girona.

Casa Omedes and its furniture are regarded as one of the most representative projects of the evolution of Masó's work during the 1920s. This was a period marked by the political repression of General Primo de Rivera's dictatorship-Masó was imprisoned and fined in early 1924 and was barred from undertaking public commissions-as well as by the launch of his residential garden city project at S'Agaró. According to Joan Tarrús and Narcís Comadira, Casa Omedes is the clearest example of how Masó assimilated the formal language of Art Deco. Referring to the façade, they write that "the compositional strength, the quality of the materials and textures, and the sensitive use of colour give Casa Omedes its extraordinary character."

Like the house itself, the dining room furniture reflects the evolution of Masó's approach to furniture design. Between 1906 and 1909 he created pieces that were still influenced by the organic forms of Catalan Modernisme (Art Nouveau). Between 1910 and 1917 he rapidly developed a distinctly Noucentista style, closely related to the aesthetics of the Viennese Secession and the British Arts and Crafts movement. During the 1920s he alternated between designs inspired by the Catalan popular Baroque tradition and Art Deco, before moving closer to Rationalism in the 1930s.

The Rafael Masó Foundation has expressed its gratitude to the Omedes family for preserving this important heritage and for entrusting it to the Foundation, thereby ensuring its long-term conservation, study and public dissemination. With the addition of the Casa Omedes dining room furniture, the Foundation expands its collection of furniture designed by Rafael Masó. In addition to the pieces on display at Casa Masó, the Foundation also preserves other furniture ensembles acquired through donations, long-term deposits and purchases. This important acquisition will make it possible to advance research into this aspect of Masó's work, the techniques and materials he employed, and his career as a furniture designer, which still awaits a comprehensive scholarly study.