In addition, supervising the museum's Antonio Ratti Textile Centre introduced him to curators from almost every department and increased his knowledge of the museum's immense holdings, which number more than 2m objects.
And not just his home: Puig i Cadafalch's Casaramona textile plant - now the CaixaForum museum of contemporary art - looks more like some extravagant fortified palace.
Ms. SUZANNE THOMASSEN-KRAUSS (Textile Curator, Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History): When you look at a lit object, what you're getting is only the light radiation that's reflecting back off the object.
Hired away from the University of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, where she was textile curator in its department of Eastern art, Ms. Barnes has researched how textile techniques and designs spread, often disseminated by merchants plying the sea-lanes.
The former jute mill in the Blackness area of the city opened as a museum in 1996 and is dedicated to the textile industry that once dominated the city's economy.