fisherman house | terra coll home

The fisherman house belongs to friends of ours who asked us to transform it into a year-round Mediterranean escape — a place to reconnect with nature and experience the elements. It is situated about four meters from the sea on a small pebble and sand cove, which is bordered on both sides by black sea-splashed rocks rising jaggedly out of the surf and spilling quickly into the open sea, which on clear days offers views to Menorca. The cottage was originally a small boat house, built haphazardly alongside other boat houses, sharing internal walls and each with a boat-door opening onto the sea.

From the beginning, we knew we wanted to convey a very soulful feeling of a handmade old-world fisherman’s house, a place textured by time and weather, that would leave our friends and their guests with the feeling that they had spent the day swimming and sunning in a secret cove, a secluded communion with sun and sea. We drew our inspiration from this coast and these experiences, and we wanted to create an interior landscape that reflected the same sense of being spontaneous, natural, and connected with the sea.

We wanted each space to feel like it was part of journey, with arches leading down narrow passageways through still more arches, leading you to the sea. There are intervals of light and shadow, with sunlight reflecting off the sea and seeping into the walls of the corridor. Embedded polished stepping stones lend a sense of anticipation to the paths they mark.

We designed the floors throughout to be textured with sand and beach pebbles, as in the cove outside, encouraging constant communication with bare feet. Both the handlaid pebble flooring and the sand-based micro mortar have a lime base. The walls of the hallway were finished in a bespoke two-tone layered stucco, in which a cream colored layer was pressed into a sea-foam green layer, creating depth of color and light. Other walls were finished in a lime mortar prepared with coarsely ground sandstone aggregate, which created a deeply textured weathered feel. In the back bedroom, in a darker part of the house farther from the sea, the sandstone mortar was left in its natural color, giving the sense of being in a cave. In other places, we lime-washed the sandstone mortar to bring in more light but retain the texture. Echoes of the house’s arches are found in the cushions we made for the living room bench as well, where the same sea-foam tones are used in the washed linen.

Stone and water make up the landscape. As such, we wanted to explore the way water shapes stone throughout the house. We sourced a local black stone for the bathroom downstairs. The sculptural sink was left raw except for a polished basin where the water flows. The shower plate was sliced from a boulder but maintains its natural shape, with the surface further smoothed by the cascading shower. The green shower glass was chosen to mirror the color of the sea. In another bathroom, stepping stones lead to a hollowed boulder trough sink, all of which were cut from the same stone, as was the shower plate. The brass will take on a unique patina from water over time to complement the natural composition. The floating bench in the living room is supported by a raw black stone similar to those that line the cove, bringing the horizon inside the house. 

The facade of the original boathouse became an internal wall in the 1970s. We wanted to honor this old wall by designing a kitchen around it and preserving it in its original state. The wall with its several arches and ancient appearance, presents a space where friends and family can gather, cook, and drink, with a stone counter passing through the wall’s openings to become a floating bar in the living room. The natural boulder sink rises from the counter and offers views to the sea. The seamless cabinetry of reclaimed barn floor oak hides all the modern kitchen amenities.

The roof terrace was conceived as an area for family and friends to relax and hang out. The four by four meter sunken lounge positions you above the cove with the sea on one side and a pine forest on the other, and was designed to give the sense of isolation of being in a boat. Above, a traditional pergola of wild olive trunks, which we treated with a bleaching process, is tied together with ropes, and supports a sail for shade draped in the manner of the local fishing boats called llaüts. The walls of the terrace are finished in a rough sandstone mortar full of natural warmth and texture, a nod to the sandstone blocks with which these boat houses were traditionally built.

The location of the house, at the far east of the island, on the very edge of the rocky sea, creates a strong impression. Add to that the old-world hand-built history of the boat house and there was a clear sense that we had to honor the connection between the house and its surroundings. In reality, the reforms done on the house in the 1970s had stripped the house of much of its charm and history. And with the house being located in a protected zone, we had to work within the existing structure.

Our vision was to create an interior landscape — spontaneous, natural, and distinct — unifying the interior with this wild coastal exterior. We hope we did that in some small way.

Lead Architects: Tatiana Baibabaeva, Tyson Strang

Photography: Salva Lopez (https://salvalopez.com/)