Casa Bahia with Architect Alejandro Landes

[nggallery id=98 template=”sliderview” display_content=”0”] When a filmmaker with no formal architecture training builds his first home, something unexpected happens. “I made the house like I would make a movie,” says the filmmaker-turned architect Alejandro Landes, who turns his lens on a buoyant brick-and-mortar premiere. “It’s designed like a sequence of shots: framing scenes of nature and shadow and light.”

The two art forms, seemingly distant, yet quite similar in their pursuit of the novel, meet, creating a house that, like film, tells a story – not through narrative but through a series of images.

Casa Bahia, this three-story waterfront home, is located on a private peninsula in Miami’s Coconut Grove. An oddly shaped corner lot with water on its three sides presented some challenges, like the area’s propensity to floods and hurricanes. Mostly, though, the heady setting delivered inspiration.

[caption id=”attachment_25571″ align=”alignleft” width=”350″]alejandro-bahia By the bay: Casa Bahia looks out on its corner of the ocean.[/caption]

“The idea was to bring the outside in and inside out,” Landes describes, referencing Brazilian architects and their use of the home as a “mirror” to its setting. Floor-to-ceiling glass allows the buoyancy of the surrounding saltwater to virtually permeate, rendering the rooms weightless, an illusion furthered by infinity edge pools.

“We wanted to create something that looks like it has been there for a very long time,” explains Landes further. “The idea was to create a modern ruin, modernist but timeless.”

To that end, he turned to the most basic, unprocessed of materials: raw concrete, unfinished woods and naked stone. Aged Burmese teak frames the doors; walls expose rough concrete and plaster; and massive shell reef slabs and Macael marble from an old Spanish quarry line the floors. The present day gives the weighty materials a lift – quite literally. Defying gravity, cantilevered balconies hover, cliff-like; a staircase of suspended stone monoliths floats at the entryway; and slate plates stack up like an enormous Jenga puzzle into a cascading wall.

“There’s a certain honesty in allowing these structural elements to be exposed, a certain naked elegance,” shares Landes. “When you’re dealing with unfinished materials, you can’t simply gloss or paint over mistakes; it is what it is.” Like layers of meaning in a screenplay, the home, he points out, is composed of a series of layered “skins.” The concrete exterior acts as an “exoskeleton” around a glass and wood interior “envelope” – a play of rough and smooth, heavy and light.

Inside, the minimalist, almost ascetic accents meld into the space seamlessly, and not incidentally. The entire interior has been custom created by Landes’ mother and award-winning designer Catalina Echavarria. The collaboration between this mother-andson pair was a first, and was carried out with the two in different parts of the world.

“I sent her plans and photographs,” recalls Landes, describing the year-long design process. The furnishings and decor, sourced from all over the globe, share the home’s “anamorphic aesthetic” – natural, floating, barely there, yet inextricable. Some were amassed from travels: handmade objects from Peru and Indonesia, Japanese lamps, and stone-washed linens and banana silk. Others were found or salvaged materials, so organic they seem to have escaped the human touch – like the driftwood side table that could have floated in on the waves behind the wraparound windows.

A number of furniture pieces were created by Echavarria herself, part of a new venture she is working on bringing to the market. The most arresting is unarguably the master bed: an airy, woven platform of rattan canes with the cocoon-like feel of a hammock or a crib. The concept occurred to Echavarria in Bali, after she was asked to design a crib for a friend’s baby. For two months, she spent every day with an artisan, practicing reed weaving; the result turned into sumptuous sleeping spots for grown-ups as well as babies.

“There’s a certain European monumentality to the beds, but also a delicacy,” says Landes, adding that his mother spent a year developing the pieces. “It was a real artisanal process, where you don’t go out and buy something; you invent something for that space.”


[caption id=”attachment_25596″ align=”aligncenter” width=”750″]CATALINA’S HANDMADE OBJECTS CATALINA’S HANDMADE OBJECTS[/caption]

Photography | Claudia Uribe

Like what you see? Get it first with a subscription to ASPIRE DESIGN AND HOME magazine.

aspire design and home is seeker and storyteller of the sublime in living. It is a global guide to in-depth and varied views of beauty and shelter that stirs imagination; that delights and inspires homeowners as well as art and design doyens. Collaborating with emergent and eminent architects, artisans, designers, developers and tastemakers, aspire creates captivating content that savors the subjects and transports with stunning imagery and clever, thought-provoking writing. Through lush and unique visuals and a fresh editorial lens, aspire explores what is new and undiscovered in art, interiors, design, culture, real estate, travel and more. aspire design and home is an international narrative and resource for all seeking the sublime.