Dwelling on the Edge

Casa Brava is a bold 1970s hillside house on the Costa Brava — a sensory, landscape-integrated dwelling where spaces reveal themselves slowly, one threshold at a time.

Dawn breaks at Casa Brava and you are already moving. Out to the coastal path while the sea unfolds in shadow beneath your feet. Back through a garden gate a few metres from the sand, around the pool, through the living room, into the kitchen — spaces that do not reveal themselves all at once, that require the body to find them in sequence. This is not accidental. Casa Brava, a 1970s house on a hillside peninsula close to Sa Riera in Begur, on the Costa Brava, was designed for exactly this kind of inhabitation: unhurried, sensory, organised around the particular quality of being somewhere that exists in genuine dialogue with the landscape rather than merely overlooking it.

The house has carried several names across its life. Built in the 1970s as Casa de Ventós I, later known as Casa de la Tortuga, it found its current identity through Viu Empordà, the project launched by Pablo Rovira to offer stays in exceptional homes that connect territory, authenticity, and beauty. The name Casa Brava alludes to the coastline, but it alludes equally to something less geographical — an intense experience, a deliberate exaltation of the senses. The house is white and bold; it makes itself visible without imposing itself, coexisting with the landscape and allowing the landscape's energy to permeate it in return.

White and bold, it makes itself visible without being imposing — coexisting with the landscape, in dialogue with it, allowing itself to be permeated by its energy.

The architecture operates at the edge in every sense — physically, on a peninsula between sea and hillside, and experientially, in the threshold condition it maintains between interior and exterior. Spaces open and close with the movements of the day: the morning coastal path, the beach immersion, the return through garden and pool and room, the kitchen reached by tiptoeing through sleeping light. To stay here is to structure one's hours around the house's spatial logic, which is also, inevitably, the logic of the sea and the land and the particular hour of sunrise on the Costa Brava.

There is a kind of home that teaches you how to live in it. Casa Brava is that kind of home.

Key takeaways

• Casa Brava — built in the 1970s near Sa Riera, Begur, and relaunched under its current identity by Pablo Rovira's Viu Empordà project — is designed around a sequential spatial experience in which interior and exterior spaces reveal themselves gradually, organised by the rhythms of the coastline rather than conventional domestic logic.
• The house takes its name from the Costa Brava but also from something more experiential: a deliberate exaltation of the senses that places the body in direct, unhurried dialogue with the landscape — a garden gate metres from the sand, a pool passed on the return from the sea, a kitchen reached through the living room at dawn.
• White and bold without being imposing, Casa Brava maintains a precise tension between visibility and restraint — making itself present in the landscape while allowing the landscape's energy to permeate it entirely, a balance that defines the best architecture of the Costa Brava tradition.