The Fundació Iluro currently owns the Casa Coll i Regàs mansion, which was designed by Josep Puig i Cadafalch in 1897. The aims of the foundation are to ensure that the building is properly maintained and to offer its spaces for cultural visits and activities related to architecture and the figure of Puig i Cadafalch.
On 12 May 1897, the builder Pere Comas, a resident of Mataró, requested a permit from the Mataró City Council to completely renovate the houses located at Carrer d´Argentona 55 and 57, which Joaquim Coll i Regàs had purchased the previous year.
The project comprised a four-storey building, basement, ground floor, first floor and attic, which were all rebuilt from scratch. The architect´s design was in keeping with the tradition of urban bourgeois houses in Mataró and, accordingly, it was the only house built in the city centre during the Modernista period.
The ground floor is known as the "planta noble", or main floor. A spacious hall that is open to the main entrance from the street leads to a series of interrelating spaces, a reception room and office facing the street, and extends inwards into the house where a centrally located staircase leads to the first floor, all set in an area illuminated by a large skylight.
The building´s main neo-Gothic façade incorporates the plinth, main doorway, large first-floor gallery and window frames made of Montjuïc stone, sculpted by Eusebi Arnau (Barcelona 1864-1934), Puig i Cadafalch´s friend and constant collaborator. The relief sculpture "La filosa" (a spinning woman holding a distaff) that crowns and completes the main entrance is today the symbol of the city of Mataró.
Puig i Cadafalch was well aware that he was designing a house for a textile manufacturer and so incorporated images of a flower, supposedly a cotton flower, and the sprockets of a textile machine into all parts of the building, appearing in its sgraffito, lead glass windows and tiles. These became the heraldic symbols of the house, expressed visually in the fireplace´s family tree, alongside the initials JCR.
The authorship of Puig i Cadafalch as designer of the work has always been evident and is confirmed by the monograph entitled L´oeuvre de Puig y Cadafalch published in Barcelona in 1904, which includes all the architect´s work from when he first began until the year of the book´s publication.