Meet the Art-World Power Couple Giving Architects Free Rein in Spain

Belgian architects David Van Severen and Kersten Geers were more than a decade into their practice when they first visited Matarraña, Spain, in 2012. They went at the invitation of art-world power duo Eva Albarrán and Christian Bourdais, who had acquired a sprawling undeveloped estate in the rural region and had met the up-and-coming designers while trawling for talent at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. Van Severen and Geers, whose Office KGDVS won the event’s prestigious Silver Lion Award for Most Promising Young Practice, were just what they were looking for. Impressed by the architects’ vision, Albarrán and Bourdais enlisted them to design a high-end vacation home that challenged the very notion of what such a house could be.

They had never experienced a site visit quite like this one. As Albarrán and Bourdais led the pair around a densely forested plateau offering 360-degree views over the soaring limestone massifs of Els Port Natural Park, they explained that the architects would have free rein to design whatever kind of house they wanted.

“When you’re given carte blanche, a funny thing happens,” says Van Severen. “You’re suddenly projected back on yourself. You think: ‘Well, where would I want to live? What’s my dream holiday home?’”

It was no ordinary client meeting, but then Albarrán and Bourdais are no ordinary clients. Since 2004, the couple have run one of France’s leading contemporary-art production companies, specializing in large-scale exhibitions and public commissions for Paris’s Grand Palais and the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, among others. As the artwork they produce has grown more complex and increasingly more monumental—take, for instance, Les Extatiques, the annual outdoor art event they stage just outside the French capital every fall, with large-scale pieces taking over wide boulevards and grand buildings—the couple’s process has necessarily become more spatial, driving a deep interest in the relationship between object and environment.

“We love art, but we always say that if we could go back and do it again, we’d pursue architecture,” says Bourdais, who met Albarrán in the mid-1990s, when they were both studying at a business school in London. (On their first date, they went to an Yves Klein exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.)

In 2010, the couple decided to pursue their architectural ambitions more head-on, hatching the master plan behind a visionary long-term hospitality project they dubbed Solo Houses. A collection of design-forward vacation-home prototypes, each created by a different leading international architect, the concept is a sort of modern European riff on California’s groundbreaking midcentury Case Study House program. Now, 15 years and dozens of permitting licenses later, their magnum opus is finally coming into view: Two homes are complete (including Van Severen and Geers’s contribution), an avant-garde hotel is underway, their organic winery is reviving the region’s deep viticultural roots, and a newly unveiled sculpture park showcases works by some of the biggest names in the art world. It’s one of the continent’s most radical hospitality ventures, expanding the boundaries of 21st-century design—and, crucially, without any of the client pushback that accompanies many architectural commissions.

“Essentially, we wanted to give architects the same creative freedom as is typically given to artists,” says Albarrán, who got her start working at influential independent galleries, including the Parisian outpost of New York’s Marian Goodman gallery.

At the same Venice Biennale where they met Van Severen and Geers, Albarrán and Bourdais also mingled with other rising young stars, including India’s Bijoy Jain and Japan’s Sou Fujimoto, both of whom they would also later commission to design residences. As Solo Houses started taking shape, the couple began articulating their criteria for the practitioners they approached. Generation-defining talent and a daring, forward-thinking sensibility were the obvious prerequisites. But knowing that the project would take decades to complete, they put just as much emphasis on personal compatibility.

Going after Pritzker Prize–winning architects was out of the question, notes Bourdais; by the time they receive the industry’s top honor, laureates are often in the twilight of their careers, with their most groundbreaking work behind them. “We wanted to identify the best architects of this generation—the people who’d make history in our lifetime,” he says. So nothing from Renzo Piano or Peter Zumthor, but two houses from the husband-and-wife teams of Los Angeles-based Johnston Marklee and Brooklyn’s SO-IL.

Albarrán and Bourdais’s quest to find the ideal setting for what they have billed as Europe’s first architecture collection began in 2009. Amid a hectic production schedule, Bourdais traveled from France to Morocco to Turkey in search of a spectacular natural setting seemingly untouched by human intervention. (“No telephone poles or overhead cables,” insisted Albarrán.) Other items on their wish list included a sunny Mediterranean climate and proximity to a major international airport.

Aragon, the autonomous Spanish community bordering Catalonia and Valencia and extending as far north as the French border, was unique in its appeal. Once a powerful independent kingdom in the Middle Ages, the region played a key role in the formation of modern Spain, with the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon to Isabella of Castile in 1469. The union merged Castile, then the mightiest and wealthiest kingdom, with Aragon, a maritime power. While the region’s influence has dwindled dramatically since then, its civilization-spanning history lives on in its most famous landmarks, such as the 11th-century Aljafería Palace and the baroque Basilica of the Lady of the Pillar, both in the capital city of Zaragoza.

For Solo Houses, however, Albarrán and Bourdais ventured far off the tourist trail to the southernmost province of Teruel, deep in the heart of España vaciada, or “empty Spain”—a term referring to the economic decline and depopulation of the country’s rural pockets. Teruel, while littered with Mudéjar landmarks and storybook-pretty towns, has been one of the hardest-hit Spanish provinces. In recent years, the government even started paying people to move to its sleepy medieval villages.

There have been no bad surprises.

For Albarrán and Bourdais, Teruel’s rich heritage and wide-open spaces provided the perfect opportunity to create their vast architectural playground while also offering meaningful employment opportunities for the region’s builders and craftspeople. Its easternmost corner, Matarraña, was particularly ideal, with its rugged mountain vistas, balmy climate, and relative ease of access to Barcelona and Valencia, just two-and-a-half- and three-hour drives away, respectively.

In 2010, they purchased 200 hectares (about 494 acres), with sweeping views of the Ports de Tortosa-Beseit mountain range and deep valleys blanketed with pine, olive, and almond trees. They approached celebrated Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets—whose portfolio notably includes the botanicals around the newly reborn Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris—to design “climate-smart” outdoor areas that link the residences and enhance ecological resilience using native species. They also enlisted the Swiss art curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director at London’s Serpentine Galleries, as a long-term collaborator and cultural adviser.

With its alpine topography and breezy location just 12 miles from the Mediterranean Sea, the Solo Houses site is not dissimilar from the wooded landscapes of Chile’s Pacific coast, where architects Mauricio Pezo and Sofía von Ellrichshausen have constructed some of their award-winning contemporary residences. It’s fitting, then, that their young South American firm was the first to complete a home, which became available for short-term stays beginning in 2013.

In response to the question “What is a house?” the Chilean architects conceived a kind of brutalist treehouse, its geometric forms and interplay of light and darkness designed to alter the perception of time—the goal of any holiday get-away, Pezo notes. A dramatic, bifurcated exterior staircase leads to an enclosed chamber, where a portal looks onto the tiled floor of the swimming pool above. From there, a spiral staircase streams up to a light-filled central pool courtyard opening directly to the sky. Standing in the hulking concrete box—the open-air nucleus of the home—evokes being in a James Turrell Skyspace, your senses heightened to the shifting of the light or the passing of clouds. To further play with perceptions, Pezo and von Ellrichshausen inverted the house’s layout, situating living areas and bed- rooms along the outer edge of the structure, in the style of an elongated veranda, with retractable glass walls that open to the outdoors.

For the architects, the Solo Houses commission was an opportunity to break from the “certifications, standardizations, and technocratic concerns that rule current architectural production,” says von Ellrichshausen. Instead, she adds, by invoking the atemporality associated with leisure time, architecture can “expose us to the mystery of our lives.”

Van Severen and Geers, whose design was completed next, were similarly drawn to austere lines and geometric forms that blur the divide between indoor and outdoor space. “The idea was to make the architecture as invisible as possible,” says Van Severen.

The pair used glass, stainless steel, and reinforced concrete to construct a circular house that traces the natural edges of a plateau, enclosing a Mediterranean garden designed by Smets. As in the Pezo von Ellrichshausen house, the floor-to-ceiling glass walls slide fully open to the elements while the interiors balance spartan lines with avant-garde furniture, such as stool-lamp hybrids by visual artist Richard Venlet and striking wire-mesh chaise longues by designer Muller Van Severen (David’s brother). On the roof, photo-voltaic panels, water tanks, and generators have been reimagined as functional sculptural objects by Belgian painter Pieter Vermeersch.

“We were cautious in our approach of finishing the residence,” recalls David Van Severen, adding that the project took five years to be realized. “The brutality of it was beautiful—it was almost like land art. We were nervous to add any more than what was necessary.”

For Albarrán and Bourdais, seeing how these architectural ideas come to fruition and evolve over time is a continual source of excitement. “What has been really rewarding is the process,” says Albarrán. “There have been no bad surprises.” Ultimately, the couple felt so at ease in the Office KGDVS home, they opted to ride out the Covid lockdown there with their three children.

Still, not every architect involved has found the project’s carte blanche approach liberating. Go Hasegawa, who is in the process of designing one of the property’s 13 vacation homes, confesses that having complete creative control has instead been a source of stress.

“I’m not happy with the freedom,” explains the Tokyo-based architect, who began his career designing small, modest structures in the Japanese capital. Nor is he interested in doing “what I want to do,” in “showing my ego.” Instead, he feels that constraints are necessary for “challenging and overcoming myself.”

While his contribution is still in development seven years in, Hasegawa says his intention is to depart from the “beautiful Western monumentality” embodied by the two existing Solo Houses. Coming from Japan, where the four seasons are pronounced, he’s also intrigued by the “timeless” quality of Matarraña’s landscapes, which remain more or less unchanged throughout the year. This is the “richness” he’s looking to explore, he says. 

Against the backdrop of the Solo Houses expansion, the couple began dividing their time between Paris and Madrid, where, in 2018, they founded a contemporary-art gallery, Albarrán Bourdais, in the tony Salamanca area. Three years later, they relocated to an airy two-floor space in the nearby Justicia neighborhood. The gallery—one of the largest in the capital, at about 8,600 square feet—has hosted major exhibitions of Swiss painter Olivier Mosset, Mexican sculptor and installation artist Héctor Zamora, and Argentina’s kinetic-art maestro, Julio Le Parc, to name a few.

The decision to open the Madrid gallery and, later, an outpost in Menorca’s capital, Mahón, happened organically. “Everything comes together easily,” explains Albarrán. “We see all these distinct elements—production, architecture, the galleries—as one and the same, because it’s all part of our vision.”

In that vein, the couple looked to extend the gallery’s programming to Teruel, giving increased visibility to their growing stable of artists while opening their property to the culturally underserved local community. (There isn’t a contemporary-art space within 60 miles of Solo Houses.) To that end, in 2019, they debuted the biannual Solo Summer Group Show, an open-air seasonal art exhibition that followed a nearly one-mile route designed by Smets.

For the inaugural edition, Albarrán and Bourdais partnered with two other leading Spanish galleries—Juana de Aizpuru in Madrid and Àngels in Barcelona—to present nine works by major artists, including the French sculptor Christian Boltanski and Colombia’s Iván Argote. Several of the pieces have become permanent fixtures on the property, notably a perforated-brick labyrinth, Truth always appears as something veiled, by Zamora.

This past summer, the gallerists decided to embrace a more permanent art program, unveiling a nearly two-mile-long circular Solo Sculpture Trail beginning and ending at the adjacent organic Venta d’Aubert winery, which they acquired and renovated in 2022.

Though Matarraña has a rich viticultural history stretching back centuries, this legacy was largely uprooted in the 1990s, when vines were replaced by more profitable crops such as almonds and olives. By adopting organic, low-yield farming methods and the use of both local and international grape varieties such as Garnacha Tinta and Cabernet Franc, Albarrán and Bourdais hope to rescue this regional know-how and put Matarraña back on the global wine map. True to the spirit of Solo Houses, they’ve given the German-Spanish winemaking duo Stefan Dorst and César Fernández total agricultural and creative control over the 44 acres under vines and have commissioned several of their artists to design custom label art.

After a tasting at the winery, visitors can walk or e-bike along the sculpture trail, encountering site-specific large-scale works by artists such as Jose Dávila, Alicja Kwade, and the Danish collective Superflex set amid the vineyard, olive groves, and fragrant pine forests. The art is available for purchase, and the idea is to commission new pieces regularly.

Many of the installations can be viewed as urgent calls for environmental action. Three works by Swiss artist Claudia Comte invite a reflection on the connection between climate change and Earth’s varied ecosystems: A visual explosion of curved lines and fiery color gradients, the Burning Sunset mural appears at risk of igniting the surrounding forest, while two leaf- and coral-shaped sculptures carved from milky-white marble conjure the fragility of nature on land and underwater.

Perched on a nearby hill overlooking the Els Port Natural Park is Catalan artist Jordi Colomer’s No? Future! installation—the famous Sex Pistols slogan rendered in a marquee-style sign, complete with blinking red lights and affixed to the roof of a vintage Volvo. Near the trailhead is Mexican artist Jose Dávila’s The Act of Being Together, a site-specific work comprising megalithic structures that recall prehistoric sites such as Stonehenge and Machu Picchu.

“I’m drawn to sculpture in its purest form, when sculpture didn’t have a name,” says Dávila, who was invited to create the piece for Solo Houses after Albarrán and Bourdais saw his stone installation at the most recent Desert X festival in California’s Coachella Valley. “When you encounter these kinds of primal volumes, you awaken an original astonishment that’s not bogged down by complex narratives.”

Dávila describes working with Albarrán and Bourdais as seamless and wonders how they juggle their booming production business, two galleries, constant travel for art fairs and architectural biennials, and ongoing construction at Solo Houses. This summer, after battling the local authorities over permits for five years, the couple received the green light to proceed with construction on a 25-room hotel designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radic. “I remember when we first started talking to Smiljan about this hotel, our middle son was just this big,” Albarrán says with a laugh, pointing down to hip height. He’s now 19.

Floating above the treetops on a stilted concrete walkway, with rooms situated inside a series of glass cylinders, the futuristic-looking hotel will reimagine high-end hospitality through the same lens of experimental design as the residences. For now, it’s slated to debut in 2028. As for when the rest of the starchitect-designed holiday homes might take shape, the couple is not committing to a hard-and-fast timeline.

“This is a lifelong project,” says Albarrán. 

“And we’re just getting started,” Bourdais adds with a smile.