Mikel, my partner, had olive groves in Teruel. One year I went with him to pick olives and I just fell in love. I told him: "We have to have this in our life", and the search began. We started in Teruel, but on a trip from Barcelona, we passed through the Baix Ebre area and loved it, so we focused there. We saw many properties, fell in love with some, and almost bought one. Then the pandemic came and we got scared, but after the fear came the calm and the certainty that this was what we truly wanted. We resumed the adventure and within half an hour of seeing this place, we had decided. So yes, it was love at first sight.

They are good friends and we are fascinated by their work on a very fundamental level. Their approach to architecture, conceptualization, and space design is extremely genuine and honest. This resonated very much with our universe, so everything flowed very naturally. We knew they would be able to shape the volume as if it were an extension of Hodei Studio and ourselves. We wanted to give them complete creative freedom. We trust them entirely.

When we bought it, the house was a wreck. We spent hours coming up with options and possible distributions until Julia and Albert from TEST drew us four lines and it was just there. They amplified every square metre as if by magic, giving shape to something we wanted and would never have found on our own. The first year we had no budget, so we started the demolition with the help of friends. When we had some savings and the license was granted, work began. Nothing was easy, because it is never easy with a tight budget and in these isolated contexts, but little by little it became a reality.

From the start, both TEST and we were clear that we wanted a structure deeply integrated into the landscape, something that would blend in. It's a privileged environment, a sort of Eden. It's tamed because it's a productive field, but we didn't want to feel like we were leaving a negative footprint; we wanted to contribute positively. Camouflage was a concept that invited us to shape the volume almost sculpturally. We decided to extract the colour from the earth around the house. After many experiments, we found the colour we wanted, sourced a supplier in southern Spain working with natural pigments, chose the closest match, and started trials. It was a fun, beautiful, and exhausting process to achieve a consistent color blend and apply it. But it was 100% worth it; we would do it again and again.

For me, ideas of simplicity and purity are constantly evolving. I try not to confine them to a static definition because today they might mean having fewer things and being more present, but in other phases of my life, they have meant more travel and climbing or creating a lot and enjoying my family. What might always remain in these concepts is the idea of staying true to myself.

Casa Lurra is the beauty of its surroundings, the simplicity of the house, the uneven color of the walls, the silence, the breeze, the rawness of the landscape, seeing my daughter grow up barefoot, planting and pruning with Mikel, talking about the wind and the scent of rosemary—these and a thousand more things take me back home, to my childhood. For me, home is that, even though it's quite different from Venezuela where I grew up.

Honestly, I don't have a favorite spot in the house; I appreciate each part for what it is and what it offers. Every space has been designed to serve its function as purely as possible, and since each serves a different purpose, I love them all!

I was raised in Venezuela, where the climate and geography are very different from this landscape. Everything here is new to me; I feel like a child discovering every taste and smell, the earth, the cold and the heat, the aromas of the Mediterranean, which drive me crazy. I started studying natural perfumery to better understand and learn how to extract them. The olive trees never cease to amaze me; that wise and beautiful tree inspires me so much. The hard, orange-coloured earth inspires me to create dishes and cups with it. The massive and playful carob trees invite you to climb them. Tuning to the rhythm of the seasons, so essential for understanding the cycle of life. Casa Lurra and the Baix Ebre have brought me all these–and it’s both overwhelming and exciting.

Hodei Studio was a project that was born the moment I met Mikel. We began with herbs because we both missed a brand of organic teas and infusions with precise, simple, suggestive blends that were also beautiful and sustainable. Then came ceramics, paintings, textiles and photography, because that is what we have always done. A year ago, Casa Lurra joined this universe as our first physical space, helping us materialize many of our ideas.

Casa Lurra is a space for sharing through artist residencies, events, retreats, and whatever else we can think of. Both the house and the terrain will adapt as our needs change over time. It's an organic space, just like us and our projects, so you never know—it's not easy to predict its future!