Hotel spoils with simplicity
Barcelona’s Casa Camper does a lot of little things to make your stay more enjoyable
BARCELONA, SPAIN — It’s certainly not your everyday hotel or B&B. You can eat free food 24/7. You can swing in a hammock in your private mini-lounge. And you can go green with a vertical garden outside your bathroom window.
When you travel, it’s always fun to find something different — in this case, an innovative combination of the thoughtful mod cons you expect in a hotel plus the caring and intimacy of a pension/B&B.
No wonder Casa Camper, with five rooms on each of five floors, has ranked as No. 1 or No. 2 on TripAdvisor for almost three years.
Owned by the Camper shoe company of Mallorca (there’s a sister hotel in Berlin), Casa Camper (casacamper.com/barcelona/defaulten. has funky features like its colours — red is popular — and the hammock.
Yet at the same time it’s also functional (subtle night light, eye level in-room safe containing an electrical outlet for recharging phones, cameras and so on, open shelves) and innovative (2 p.m. late checkout, and that free food: in upmarket hotels usually only the executive — read “more expensive” — floors have access to a lounge with complimentary food).
“The Camper people travel a lot so they designed the hotel to meet the needs of often jet-lagged travellers,” general manager Susana Marin told me.
“Most mini-bars provide mostly alcohol or candy, which you might not feel like if you wake up at 3 a.m. We have healthy options like yogurt, with or without muesli. And our guests respect this: they don’t treat it like an all-you-can-eat — or take away — buffet.”
You can choose from a wide selection, from cooked-to-order (as well as cold items) at breakfast to soup, veg/pasta/rice/fruit salads, pastries, drinks and snacks the rest of the day and night.
It’s top quality, from the cloth tablecloths and serviettes to smoked salmon sandwiches to environmentally friendly flow-through mesh tea bags with real tea leaves to the freshly prepared fruit and other salads (not brought-in mass-produced food with additives to keep it fresh) to artisan potato chips.
The food is constantly replenished and while it is mostly selfservice, you can have breakfast for everybody in the room delivered for about $8.50.
The bathrooms look out on a vertical garden of potted plants. Every room (from around $400 a night) has its own private mini-lounge across the corridor with couch (which could convert into a king-sized bed) and hammock; the suites combine bedroom with mini-lounge.
The restored 19th century gothic tenement has a rooftop terrace and a fully equipped basement gym … and fun signs suggesting you walk downstairs instead of taking the elevator, and “no!” instead of “private” or “do not enter” on staff-only doors.
The hotel fronts a mostly pedestrian-only narrow street, which could be a bit noisy if somebody is sleeping in the lounge room especially on the lower floors. But the separating hall (or sliding door in the suite) means the bedroom is quiet. I spent the first night with the divided setup, then two nights in the all-in-one suite.
Location is ideal: in the middle of the old town, two blocks off the popular strolling tourist Las Rambla boulevard, just a few blocks down from Catalanya Square and a few blocks up from the famous, colourful and delicious La Boqueria market where I’d never seen so many fresh fruit juice mixes.
And there’s a bonus for foodies: Next door (and part of the hotel) is Dos Palillos, a one Michelin star restaurant where you have a choice of three tasting menus of different quantity and quality. You join fellow diners along a bar as the Spanish-Asian fusion dishes are prepared or finished in front of you.
Some dishes, like the smoked bone marrow, are served still smoking from the charcoal on the plate. While there are two seatings, the restaurant is small so book well ahead — dospalillos.com
Casa Camper’s philosophy sums up its approach:
“At Camper we believe that luxury lies in simplicity, discretion, authenticity, healthy life and in understanding esthetics as culture, as a source of inner satisfaction.”