Sunday Escape - Casa del Alcantilado - A contemporary Gaudiesque cave stocked inside a cliff

What if a young couple and a study of architects, all sharing an imagination without limits, join together?

The answer can be found in Spain, in Salobreña, in the province of Granada. Here, among the rocks of the Spanish Calpe coast, there is Casa del Acantilado or "house on the cliff", a building, defined by its own designers Pablo Gil and Jaime Bartolomé as "a contemporary Gaudiesque cave" because of its shape resembles the imaginative style of Anton Gaudì, a giant dragon head with the stylized eyes and a huge wide open mouth and scaly skin. This effect of scales that characterizes the undulated roof, the detail that makes this a unique construction, is made with handcrafted zinc scales modeled around a wire mesh.

"Our task was to integrate the house within the magnificent landscape surrounding it, and to direct the living spaces towards the sea", explained the architects, "The form of the house and its metallic roof produce a calculated aesthetic ambiguity between the natural and the supernatural, seeming like the skin of a dragon set in the ground, when seen from below, and the waves of the sea when seen from above"

Another feature of the villa built in 2015 is the strong inclination, about 42 degrees. To solve this problem it develops mostly below ground, inside the cliff, as in the Costa Blanca typical fortified houses. Its underground development, together with an air cavity between the interior and retaining walls, capable of channeling inward the air flows coming from the sea, gives the building without other conditioning systems, the constant temperature of about 19.5 ° C throughout the year.

Casa del Acantilado has a large living room on two levels, a cantilevered terrace with a swimming pool on the lower floor, three bedrooms, bathroom, balconies and huge windows that overlook the Mediterranean Sea. It also has a large underground space that can be used to shows and events and contain up to 70 people. The interior design and furniture made of bespoke fiberglass and polyester resin, which looks to have been inspired by the white froth created by the crashing waves below the cliff, are also the work of the Madrid Gil Bartolomé Architects studio.