How a detour through the Eixample became my best-selling pendant
By Kirsten Dexter
We weren't supposed to be in Barcelona that long. My husband and I had planned a biking trip along the Costa Brava — one of those trips where you cover twenty or thirty miles a day, stop in small towns, eat too well, and fall asleep the moment you're horizontal. Barcelona was just the starting point. A night or two, then north to the coast.
But Barcelona doesn't let you pass through.
The Door on Gran Via
We were walking through the Eixample — that grid of wide boulevards where every block seems to be competing for the most beautiful facade — when I stopped mid-sentence. My husband kept walking a few steps before he realized I wasn't beside him anymore.
It was a door. Or rather, the ironwork over a courtyard window at Casa Golferichs, a 1901 building on Gran Via de Les Corts Catalanes. The architect was Joan Rubió, a protégé of Gaudí, and you can feel the influence — organic, confident, nothing wasted. But what stopped me was the geometry of the ironwork itself. An outer ring. An inner circle that seemed to float inside it. Crossing needles that held the whole structure in tension, like a compass suspended in midair.
I'd been sketching architectural details for years by then. I'd filled notebooks with rose windows and balcony railings and cathedral tracery. But this was different. This wasn't a solid form I'd need to miniaturize. This was already open — air moving through iron, negative space doing as much work as the metal. I remember thinking, this is already a pendant. Someone just made it at the wrong scale.
One afternoon, we stopped for lunch at Els Quatre Gats — a café that's been part of Barcelona's creative DNA since 1897. Tucked into the basement of a building designed by Modernisme architect Puig i Cadafalch, it was once the gathering place for the city's artists and intellectuals, including a young Picasso. Sitting beneath those Art Nouveau arches, surrounded by the same kinds of architectural details that inspire my jewelry, it hit me how deeply design is woven into everyday life here. In Barcelona, even lunch comes with inspiration.
Back at the ironwork, I took photos from every angle. I sketched it twice. My husband found a bench and waited. He'd seen this before.
What Open Meant
Every piece I'd designed up to that point had been solid — a form carved or cast, worn flat against the body. The Barcelona ironwork showed me something else entirely. The inner circle and crossing needles appeared to float within the outer ring because Rubió understood that what you leave out matters as much as what you put in. The iron wasn't just decorative. It was structural art — each element hand-forged to bear weight while creating the illusion of weightlessness.
That tension between strength and delicacy is what I wanted to translate into jewelry. Not a miniature replica, but the same principle: a pendant where the design breathes, where light passes through, where the piece changes depending on the angle and what you're wearing underneath it.
The Barcelona pendant became my first open design — and it changed everything about how I approached my work after that. The inner circle floats. The crossing needles hold it in tension. Pavé diamonds catch light from every direction because there's no solid back to block it. It was the piece that taught me negative space could be the most important element in a design.
It also became one of my best sellers. I think that's because it works the way the best architectural details work — it's bold enough to notice from across a room, but the closer you look, the more you see.
Rubió's Barcelona
Most visitors come to Barcelona for Gaudí, and they should. Sagrada Família is overwhelming in the best possible way, and Casa Batlló's facade looks different every time I see it. But Barcelona's architectural story is bigger than one genius. Gaudí had collaborators, students, rivals — an entire generation of architects called the Modernistes who were reinventing what buildings could be.
Joan Rubió was one of Gaudí's most trusted collaborators before striking out on his own. Casa Golferichs doesn't appear on most tourist maps. It sits on a busy stretch of Gran Via, easy to walk right past if you're headed somewhere else. That's what makes Barcelona so rewarding for anyone who likes to look closely — the city's best details aren't behind velvet ropes. They're on the street, at eye level, hiding in plain sight.
A Jeweler's Walking Guide to Barcelona
The Eixample. This is where I'd start, because this is where Barcelona's architectural ambition lives at its most concentrated. Walk Passeig de Gràcia for the famous facades — Casa Batlló, Casa Amatller, La Pedrera — but then turn onto the side streets. Carrer de Mallorca, Carrer de València, Gran Via itself. The lesser-known Modernisme buildings are less crowded and just as stunning. Look at the ironwork. Every gate, every window grate, every balcony railing was designed as carefully as the facade it's attached to. Gaudí famously said there are no straight lines in nature, and his students took that seriously — the metalwork curves and flows like something grown, not built.
The Gothic Quarter. Go early morning, before the crowds. The Barri Gòtic is where Barcelona's oldest ironwork lives — door knockers shaped like hands, window grates with patterns that date back centuries, stone carvings worn soft by time and salt air. Stand in Plaça del Rei and look up at the gallery arches of the Palau Reial Major. Walk down Carrer del Bisbe and study the Gothic bridge overhead — its carved stone tracery is a masterclass in pattern and negative space. The same principle I found in Rubió's ironwork, just five centuries earlier.
El Born. If you have time for only one basilica, make it Santa Maria del Mar. Its rose window stopped me cold the first time, and it still does. But El Born is also where you find artisan workshops still practicing centuries-old metalsmithing techniques. Watching a craftsman work iron in a tiny Born studio was one of the moments that convinced me my sketches could actually become real jewelry.
Evening. Find a table near Santa Maria del Mar. Order pa amb tomàquet and a glass of Priorat. Watch the light move across the basilica's stone face. This is when Barcelona reveals its quietest beauty — the same light that makes the Eixample ironwork glow at golden hour, softened now, settling into the old stone like it belongs there.
The Costa Brava, Eventually
We did make it to the Costa Brava. The biking was everything we'd hoped — cliff roads above turquoise water, fishing villages where the seafood was still wet from the morning catch, the kind of physical exhaustion that makes a cold beer taste like the best thing you've ever had.
But I kept thinking about that door. I sketched it again from my photos that first night in Tossa de Mar, sitting on the balcony of our hotel while my husband mapped the next day's route. By the time we flew home, I knew the Barcelona pendant would be an open design. I just had to figure out how to make iron float in gold.
It took months of working with my caster to get it right — the proportions, the way the inner circle sits, the diamond placement. But the moment I held the first finished piece, I recognized it. Not as a copy of Rubió's ironwork, but as the same idea, translated. Strength and delicacy. Structure and air. Something solid that somehow lets the light through.
Three sizes now — small, medium, large — in 14-karat gold and oxidized sterling silver. The piece that taught me what leaving space open could do.
Kirsten Dexter is a fine jewelry designer based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her architectural jewelry is inspired by the cities and coastlines she's explored with sketchbook in hand. Shop the Barcelona pendant and full collection at kirstendexter.com.
Planning Your Barcelona Detail Hunt
Best time to visit: Late September through November. Warm light, thinner crowds, outdoor terraces still open.
Stay near: The Eixample or El Born for walking access to the best architectural details.
Don't miss: Casa Golferichs on Gran Via de Les Corts Catalanes. Most visitors walk right past it. Don't.
Pack: A small sketchbook or journal. Even if you don't draw, noting the details you notice will change the way you travel.