STYLE : VIVA BARCELONA! : DESIGN : Showroom at the Top

Vincon, Barcelona’s most influential and accessible interior design emporium, began in 1929 when Enrique Levi, Hugo Vincon and Jacinto Amat set up shop to import and wholesale German porcelain. For decades, business was up and down. But by 1967, Spain had opened itself to the rest of Europe just enough to create a small demand for contemporary housewares from Italy, Scandinavia and elsewhere. That year, Amat’s sons, Fernando and Joan, took over and formed the city’s first major home design outlet, a kind of mini-Conran’s. Today, Vincon is a 9,000-square-foot, two-level showroom, with departments for tableware, kitchen utensils, lighting, textiles (many by designer Javier Mariscal, whose comic man/dog creature, Cobi, is the official mascot of the Summer Olympics) and, above all, furniture and accessories by Spain’s top architects and designers, including Oscar Tusquets, Alfred Arribas, Eduard Samso and Jaume Tressera (whose pieces decorated Kim Basinger’s high-style apartment in the first “Batman”).