Casa Piera

Casa Piera opened in 1941, when Vicente Piera Amat and Conchita Domènech Casas took a 60-square-metre shop on Carrer Cardenal Casañas, just off Plaza del Pi in central Barcelona, and began selling to the city's artists, artisans and art students. The business grew from that single small storefront into a business with locations in Sant Cugat and Vic as well as Barcelona, before consolidating its main premises in 2014 at Carrer del Pintor Fortuny, 21 — a 650-square-metre space large enough to give customers room to exhibit their own work alongside the shop's stock.

The present-day range covers the working needs of painters, illustrators and designers alike: oil, acrylic, watercolour, gouache and tempera paint; pencils, charcoal, pastels and markers; papers and sketchbooks; brushes and palette knives; canvas and stretchers; printmaking tools; and art-instruction books, alongside supplies for design, illustration and school use.

Eighty-plus years on from a couple opening a small shop off the Plaza del Pi, Casa Piera is still a family-founded business trading a few streets from its original address, now serving Barcelona's professional and student artists from a space built specifically to make room for their work.