The Barcelona I didn't expect

I had been to Barcelona once before, years ago, for a weekend. I remembered it as beautiful and relentless in equal measure. When the project came up, six weeks, a client in the tech district, I booked without much deliberation. It was the practical choice. I didn’t expect it to be anything more than that.

I stayed at Livingstone, a two-bedroom apartment in the Eixample. My daughter was flying in from London for part of the stay, so the second bedroom mattered. The rest I assumed would sort itself out.

It sorted itself out before I even arrived.

The car was waiting at the airport. The property manager was at the building when I got there, not a lockbox, not a code sent by email, an actual person who walked me through the apartment, handed me the keys, and spent twenty minutes telling me things about the neighbourhood that I would not have found in any guide. The fridge was already stocked. I had sent a list a few days before without thinking much of it, and everything was there. After a transatlantic flight and a full day of travel, I did not have to think about groceries. That sounds small. It was not small.

The first week was just work. The apartment made that easy. The kitchen is the kind you can actually use, long, well-equipped, properly lit, and the living room has a painting above the sofa that I found myself looking at during calls in a way I couldn’t quite explain. The light through the Eixample windows in the morning is particular. You notice it after a few days.

The second week my daughter arrived and the city changed register.

We cooked most evenings. The markets nearby had the kind of produce that makes cooking feel less like a task and more like the point of the day. She would find things at the stalls, a cheese, a wine, something we didn’t have a name for, and we would figure out dinner from there. The kitchen table fits four but it felt right for us. We talked more than we had in months.

The personalized itinerary helped more than I expected. I had assumed it would be generic. It wasn’t. It was built around my schedule, the days I was free, the times I wanted to avoid crowds, the kind of thing I’d actually want to do rather than what everyone does. We went places I wouldn’t have found otherwise, at times when they were actually worth visiting.

The work was going well. Better than I had expected, and better than it would have at home.

I’ve thought about why since I got back. Part of it was the apartment, having a real space, a kitchen, a second room, the feeling of being somewhere rather than passing through. Part of it was the city and its particular rhythm, the long lunches that turned out to be thinking time, the walks between meetings where I was actually solving problems without knowing it.

And part of it was the absence of friction. Every logistical thing that could have been a small problem wasn’t. The transfer, the welcome, the stocked fridge, the itinerary, none of it was elaborate, but all of it was considered. When you’re working at full capacity in a city you don’t know, that kind of consideration is worth more than it costs.

I didn’t expect to want to go back. I’m already looking at dates.

Phillip stayed at Livingstone, Bizflats’ two-bedroom apartment in the Eixample, for six weeks. The apartment includes airport transfer, grocery pre-stocking, a personal welcome from your property manager, and a custom itinerary built around your schedule. View Livingstone