If you ever travel to the island of Lanzarote in the Canaries and have an interest in architecture, you'll probably hear the name César Manrique. He was born in Lanzarote in 1919, and after fighting in the Spanish Civil War and briefly pursuing architectural studies, established a career as a sculptor, artist and advocate for sustainable tourism. He succeeded in obtaining a long-standing ban on high-rise hotels* on Lanzarote, and in outlining planning regulations aiming for visual harmony...
And along with designing an art and culture center, numerous houses and the Timanfaya National Park visitor center, Manrique came up with the design concept for this cave house near the village of Nazaret for British developer Sam Benady, whose goal was to create a kind of show house that would spur orders for other (perhaps less ambitious) structures. Local sculptor Jesus Soto designed and detailed the interior spaces, and Benady's team began construction on the site of a lava rock quarry in the early 1970s.
A good-humored spirit comes along for the ride with formal invention, enhanced by individual sculptures placed around the garden, with sculptural curves of the white building forms around and above the pool, and visible high on the cliffs...
The approach to the cave house, which is arranged around a garden and swimming pool, follows Manrique's dictum of using the existing rock formations as a guide to creating a kind of organic architecture. Man-made structures inserted into the cliffs are painted white, as are the exterior walls of the volcanic island's more traditional houses. These white walls are in keeping with Manrique's color guidelines, which also restricted paint colors for wood trim on windows and doorways all over Lanzarote to a palette of bright green taken from fishing boats, dark brown, and along the seaside, bright blue...
Above, a tunnel leads to an entry carved into the cliffside. Soto designed interior spaces with the aim of transporting inhabitants to a world of dream or fantasy. As with the work of Antonio Gaudi*, an aura of mystery pervades its many levels. Below, a water tunnel leads to a stairway...
...one of several carved into the rock. Handmade light fixtures of metal and blown glass accentuate the shapes of openings and walls.
Just how many levels there are is not readily visible, as not all areas are open to the public. The house is just under 530 square meters in area (that's 5,700 square feet), so there's plenty to explore beyond those closed spaces. The pool and water tunnel are at the ground level, and a bedroom and game room are one level up, and a narrower set of steps ascends to enter the caves. According to photographer Veronika Sprinkel*, "Overall the place ebbs and flows with the shape of the cave, so in many cases the idea of one level is a little subjective."
Soto's design for the interior spaces follows dictum of letting the rock formations generate the architecture.
Even the rooms that are mostly enclosed by rock walls and ceilings have openings to stunning outdoor views...
The house passed through the hands of a few different owners after a famous actor bought it and then lost it in a card game, until in 1989 a married couple, Dominik von Boettinger and Beatriz van Hoff, both architects, bought Lagomar with the idea of renovating and opening it to the public. They added a restaurant that serves as a space for art exhibits and cultural gatherings, and opened the renovated cave house to the public in 1997.
We've finally arrived at the game room, with a card table that serves as a reminder to tell that story about the actor who lost this house in a card game. You were probably beginning to wonder if we were ever going to get around to it...
Sometime in 1972, a Spanish film crew arrived in Lanzarote to film "L'Isla Misteriosa y el Capitan Nemo" with actor Omar Sharif in the title role of the Jules Verne story. The film was fairly faithful to the original story, and was released in March 1973. The story involves shipwrecked sailors sheltering in a cave, and encountering Captain Nemo, sheltering in a watery grotto along with the Nautilus. During the filming, Omar Sharif happened upon Benady's cave house, then still under construction. Enchanted by the idea as well as by the living space (and maybe under the influence of that film script), he decided on the spot to buy the place. A couple of days after Sharif moved in, Sam Benady (seated to the right of Sharif below) challenged him to a bridge game, with the house as the center of the bet. Sharif lost at bridge, and the house passed back to Benady. What the actor did not know at the time was that he had lost to someone who'd won the European bridge championship. Still, despite his brief ownership, the house is known today as the Casa Omar Sharif, or Lagomar.
*Photo Credits:
All photos were graciously provided by Veronika Sprinkel, a frequent commenter in early days of this blog.
*Footnotes:
Antonio Gaudi's Casa Mila was featured in our post from June 26, 2019, entitled "Roadside Attraction: Gaudi's Casa Mila". The one exception to the Manrique-sponsored prohibition of tall buildings on Lanzarote was the construction in 1974 of the Arrecife Gran Hotel, a 15-story exercise in routine modernism. It's not clear why an exemption from the rule was granted, but the hotel is the exception that proves the wisdom of the rule...
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