Casa del Punt de Ganxo

Casa del Punt de Ganxo, a 1906 Modernista apartment building in Valencia’s Plaza de la Almoina, went up around and above a 1719 Baroque chapel rather than on top of its ruins. Architect Manuel Peris Ferrando left the chapel of San Valero and San Vicente intact at street level, its Baroque doorway still facing the square where the bishop of Zaragoza was believed to have been imprisoned before his exile during Diocletian’s persecution.

The building’s name, Casa del Punt de Ganxo (House of the Crochet Hook), comes from its sgraffito facade: white floral motifs on blue and crimson, pilasters shaped to imitate tree trunks, and an overall texture that reads more like a piece of lacework than a plaster wall. It’s a Valencian reading of Art Nouveau, indebted to Paul Hankar’s Brussels townhouses but reworked into something more handmade than industrial, standing quietly in one of the city’s oldest squares while the chapel beneath it keeps doing what it was built to do in the first place.