Given that Christian Bourdais is the co-director of an art gallery, you would have thought the two holiday houses he helped design in rural Spain would be full of artworks. Turns out, no. The buildings are blank; there is not a single painting, drawing or print to be seen.
'But,' says Bourdais, speaking on Zoom from his home in Madrid, 'with this kind of architecture, you don't really need art.'
Bourdais, 51, who is from France, worked as an antiques dealer in Southeast Asia and now runs the Albarrán Bourdais gallery in Madrid, alongside his wife, Eva Albarrán. In 2010, the couple started Solo Houses - an architecture project that is the site of the aforementioned art-free homes. The idea was this: Bourdais and Albarrán bought a 494-acre plot of land in northeastern Spain, overlooking Puertos de Tortosa-Beceite natural park, then commissioned various bigwig architects to create fantastical buildings on it.
Today, two out of a proposed 16 houses have been finished and a third is under construction. The completed properties sleep four and six people each and are available as holiday rentals. Bougie holiday rentals, too; in the high season, it costs £750 a night to stay in the house sleeping four, around £900 for the larger property. The third project, meanwhile, is being built by Smiljan Radić, the architect who designed the 2014 Serpentine Pavilion. When finished, in 2028, it will function as a 25-bedroom hotel. (The other 13 buildings are yet to be started, but plans include a latticed wooden house and a villa with trees on its roof.)
Finding the right area took Bourdais and Albarrán months. The couple looked at places in Morocco, Portugal, Italy and Turkey. They needed somewhere that was unspoilt - Bourdais specified there be no telephone poles or overhead cables in sight - and sunny, 'because we wanted them to be summer houses'. More importantly, they needed somewhere with a council that wasn't going to be fussy about planning permission. This eliminated Bourdais' homeland. 'In France, it's impossible to build a house in nature. You have to use certain construction materials, the roof has to have a special inclination,' he says, with a little sigh.
They settled on Spain. Specifically on Teruel in Aragon, a hilly region just under three hours from Barcelona and Valencia, and one hour from the Mediterranean. It sounds lovely but Teruel has experienced what locals call 'España vaciada', or 'empty Spain' - a term that refers to how, in recent decades, a lack of economic opportunities caused massive depopulation in rural areas. The situation in Teruel was serious enough that the Spanish government has paid people to move there. So, unsurprisingly, the council was relaxed about Bourdais' and Albarrán's building plans.
The important thing about Solo Houses is that the architects were given carte blanche to build whatever they wanted. Bourdais and Albarrán had no creative influence; the architects even got to choose furniture, and which books went on the bookshelves.
The only limit was - obviously and boringly - money. Bourdais won't say how much he gave as a budget, but he does say, 'Of course, the architects did not respect it! All architects, all over the world [don't respect budgets]. I mean, it's very human, isn't it? You always want more. But we knew that and anticipated it.' (Solo Houses began as a privately owned project and, although they make money back through rentals, they have brought in investors to help fund the future buildings.)
The first house was designed in 2011 by the Chilean firm Pezo von Ellrichshausen, and took two years to finish. It's a sort of concrete tree house; a 16-metre by 16-metre square that sits on top of a massive concrete column. To get in, you climb a 187-step staircase. Inside, there are two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and - in the central courtyard - a pool. The furnishings are spare: white cushions, the occasional floor lamp; a carefully placed rocking chair.
The second building came four years later, was made by the Belgian studio Office KGDVS and is also built with concrete. But it’s perfectly circular. From above the home resembles a tyre; it has a hollowed-out centre with a pool and courtyard, and around that centre runs a circular track of rooms, with glass on either side.
It looks a bit poky, honestly, and Bourdais says the rooms themselves are not very large. But there’s a trick: the glass ‘walls’ are in fact sliding doors that can be pushed open so that nothing separates the house from the outside. The result is excellent. In 2018, when the building featured in the BBC series The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes, the host shunted open the kitchen doors and remarked that now, as there were no walls whatsoever, he was standing in ‘the biggest room in Spain’.
The furniture is whizzy, too. The curtains are made from silvery material that you can see through from one side but not into from the other. And by the pool there are gridded steel deck chairs coated in a paint that looks transparent in the sun.
The latter were designed specially by Muller Van Severen - a well-known Belgian furniture maker and brother to one of the architects.
I ask Bourdais if they’re comfy. ‘Well, if you lie on them as they are, your body will get completely [dented with] squares. But we put a little mattress on top of them and then they’re perfect.’ Recreations of the chairs are now in the Pompidou Centre in Paris and Moma in New York. They also sell on Van Severen’s website, from around £2,600 - little mattress not included.
Even boring things are dealt with glamorously. On the roof there are four concrete structures, shaped into cylinders, cones and cubes. They look like modern sculptures but are, in fact, practical storage units: a water tower and a generator, plus heating and filtration systems. (Both buildings get their water from wells and are also connected to the water supply in the local village which is five kilometres away.)
Bourdais says that the circular home 'is probably the best house that's been built in the past 30 years'. He spent three months there during lockdown and stays every summer when it's not rented with his wife and three children. I ask what he loves about it and he describes the bedrooms at night.
'Normally, when people stay, they are worried at the beginning about animals, so on the first night they might only open the doors a little.' (Wildlife-wise, the region has foxes and wild boar - but Bourdais has never seen either himself.) Anyway, by the next night, 'they might open them a little more'. And by the third night, he says, everyone cracks and sleeps with the doors pushed wide open. This is when the house is at its best: the cool air comes in and you can see the stars from bed. 'It's special. It's very, very special.'
The creators, Eva Albarrán and Christian Bourdais