This vacation house is located on a little cornice perched over the Mediterranean, an excepcional place, and was built for an industrialist with an important collection of 20th-century art. Two landscapes: the horizon of the sea outside, painting and sculpture inside. The house is a construction for light.

Yago Bonet’s best architecture came with a series of houses scattered throughout the countryside and along the coast that were very influenced by the purist aspects of the Tendenza, owing to his proximity to Rossi, and to the architectonic stage sets he built for Adria Gual’s company.

The house was literally built around two enormous sculptures —a man, by Arranz Bravo, and a woman, by Bartolozzi— which were placed where they are before construction began. A group of marble columns with capitels and wreaths, taken from an old building, set off the hanging garden’s only boundary and are situated before a large palier with climbing plants, as if they were the ruins of a Mediterranean temple or the site of an ancient amphitheater. The house is also a theater, in a way, a box with a double-level opening covered with a curtain. This arrangement, which the architect already used in other country houses in Catalonia, necessarily faces west in this case. No other possibility is available for the hanging garden, but the obligatory sunshade acts as a curtain between the garden and the house. And the house is reduced to being a cube of stuccoed walls placed between stone walls and the stone cliff.

As a crowning touch, the architect suggested the owner wear a Roman tunic so as to best enjoy the Mediterranean from up among the marble, the pine trees and the bougainvillea...[+]