The Landscape Is The Screen

Two architecture obsessives, frustrated architects in all but qualification, turned a baroque hermitage in Aragón's Matarranya into Consolación: a hideaway of ten glass cubes, a slow-food kitchen and no televisions whatsoever.

The owners are, by their own affectionate admission, frustrated architects: passionate amateurs who care about buildings the way other people care about wine or horses, and who worked hand in glove with their designers rather than simply hiring them. What they have made, in a thyme-scented fold of Aragón’s Matarranya near Monroyo, is a small architectural enclave. At its heart is an 18th-century baroque hermitage raised on 16th-century and older foundations; the Zaragoza branch of the Camino de Santiago still passes the gate, a scallop shell set in the facade. Beside it, the casa principal gathers a lounge in the former stables, a restaurant in the old outhouse, a library with a Chesterfield and a chandelier, a bar that folds back into the reception desk, and a handful of guest rooms. Two have been recently renovated, their solid oak floors requiring bespoke templates from one of the region’s last master carpenters to resolve a structural problem.

Consolación's ten cubic rooms stand on the hillside a hundred metres above, reached on foot through rosemary and thyme. Estela Camprubí and Eugènia Santacana, the Barcelona architects, designed them in 2009, drawing on Craig Ellwood’s panelised California and Glenn Murcutt’s knack for letting a building settle lightly into its landscape. The materials are copper-treated pine, slate, glass and oak. Each cube holds a single solid-oak unit that swallows all the storage; slate floors meet tatami-height beds, suspended fireplaces, sunken slate bathtubs and full-height glazing onto the barranco. There is no television, on principle: the landscape is the screen.

Set in the glass-walled old barn, a stone-and-steel dining room of about thirty covers, the restaurant stays open year-round and welcomes non-guests, and it cooks the Matarranya more or less wholesale: organic vegetables, Ternasco de Aragón lamb, black truffle dug nearby at Monroyo, cured ham under the Teruel denomination, shepherds’ cheeses from Peñarroya de Tastavins, and fish brought up from the Benicarló market though the sea is a good fifty kilometres off. Traditional recipes read through a contemporary lens arrive as a four-course Tradición or a longer Degustación. You are met on arrival with soup and juice and sent off with a box of the hermitage’s own biscuits.

After dark, a 24-hour listening bar set apart pours vermut over ice and nods to the clandestine poker games once outlawed in Spain. The pool keeps its own counsel in a clearing, an angular silhouette looking out over pine, almond and olive and imposing a quiet geometry on the Aragonese scrub. Beyond it: truffle hunts, kayaking, an old railway turned cycle path, and a night sky with nothing to compete with it.

As featured in UNWAXED LEMONS, our limited-edition Mediterranean magazine.

View through a Moorish stone arch at Consolación to the hillside hearth and the Matarranya beyond | The Aficionados

Three timber-clad Kube rooms perched on the rocky Aragonese hillside at Consolación | The Aficionados

Angular hillside pool at Consolación overlooking the pine-clad Matarranya valley | The Aficionados

Fringed parasols and colourful chairs on the Verge Santa terrace at Consolación, Monroyo | The Aficionados

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