Far suaver than his earlier Casa Vicens, the Palau Güell is quite as strikingly novel all the same. At the base yawn a pair of parabolic arches, their tops filled above a plain reticulated grille with sinuous seaweed-like ornament of the most extravagant virtuosity (Plate 96B). The ‘Dragon Gate’ of the Finca Güell of 1887 in the Avenida Pedralbes is still stranger, with a nightmare quality which those of the house in town happily lack. On either side of the entrance arches and in the projecting first storey the façade of the Palau Güell is no more than a rather plain rectangular grid of stone mullions and transoms. In scale this grid is more like Parris’s Boston granite fronts of the twenties than like English window-walls, but it is detailed in a cranky medievalizing way that is more comparable to Webb’s handling of stonework (Figure 17). The rear façade towards the court includes in the middle a broad bay-window with curved corners protected by sunscreens as original but less fantastic than the grilles at the entrance. The most extraordinary features of the exterior, however, are the chimney-pots rising in profusion above the flat roof like an exhibition of abstract sculpture and entirely covered with a mosaic of irregular fragments of glass, rubble, or coloured tiles. In them the extravagance of his earlier houses was continued, and such terminal features remained characteristic of all his later secular work. [Illustration: Figure 17. Antoni Gaudí: project for Palau Güell, Barcelona, 1885, elevation ] The interiors of the Palau Güell are extremely sumptuous. There is much use of marble arcades of parabolic arches carried on round columns, both arches and columns being detailed with the greatest mathematical elegance and simplicity, yet with considerable variety. Some of the ceilings are of marble slabs carried by visible iron beams, but in the principal apartments there are incredibly elaborate confections of woodwork in the Moorish tradition.