The house: a universe to create

‘If you're useful, you’ll be used’

This maxim seems a little severe and might even be a bit frightening if it were said to you by the gentlemen smoking a cigar who appears in the fifth photograph, especially if you were his son. But it's actually a great piece of advice: it is stripped of all presumption, and if understood properly, it embodies a civic responsibility towards others. They are actually words that Miguel Milá assimilated as a commitment to communal well-being. And they are even more valuable because they are like a secular credo —functional yet flexible— from 1950s Spain, between rules written in stone and 'every man for himself’.

Mr José María Milá i Camps, Miguel's father, was a patrician in inter-war Barcelona; he was pro-monarchy and a handsome bon vivant. Mrs Montserrat Sagnier Costa, his mother, was the epitome of the Catalan housewife, austere and allergic to ostentation, emanating serene authority. The combination of sobriety and refinement that his parents embodied is, perhaps, the source of the sober elegance that Miguel Milá ended up synthesising in both his design and his way of seeing his profession and the world.