The story of the Costa Blanca now includes a Kandinsky. This perfect and timeless exhibit can be now viewed in an expanse where nature and creativity go hand in hand. A search for artistic reference has brought together the garden and the painting by Kandinsky. A project by Pepe Cabrera that is in itself is a new take on a traditional garden.
Architect: Pepe Cabrera Architecture and Interior Design Year of the project: 2018 Photographer: Mayte Piera Photographic Editor: Adrián Maroto
Certain Arab courtyard influences have now converged in a private garden. A garden designed for visual impact in a minimalist environment where the line between materiality and vegetation has been brought together. Nature is the creative principle and bedrock behind everything that exists. This is how the geometric and the organic combine together to make way for the organised and the rawness to be in tandem.
This vision leads Pepe Cabrera to search for a project that speaks to a creative, organised space with room for nature. Thus the curved shape becomes a figurehead capable of integrating, distributing and organising space while at the same time connecting with its surroundings without them competing with each other.
In this way, Pepe Cabrera finds liberation in abstraction. A parallel between his work and the aesthetic providing natural realism to the environment that stands boldly in front of the 'Jardín in the Marina Alta'.
The essence of this project marks the unifying character between the garden and agriculture. The orange groves and almond trees, a tennis court and the house itself are all connected. Connections that alone make up the essence of the day to day usage of this private garden in the Marina Alta. Such links turn the surroundings into a pure, cordial, geometric vision, capable of unifying the rigidity of the construction with nature.
Therefore the agricultural landscape that surround the 'Jardín in the Marina Alta' serve as a base and inspiration for the development of this expanse.
Like the fields that surround it, dry stone borders amplify the larger circular areas which contain trees and indigenous specimens. At the same time they serve to amplify the different levels that rise up the garden. So we could say that these particular structural components present in agriculture are now encompassed by Pepe Cabrera as the structural components of this garden.
The aim of creating spatial continuity leads the architecture and interior design studio to propose a continuity between the artwork generated by the different peripheries and components of the garden with a local flavour that allow the garden to be practically autonomous and self-sufficient.
Thus these pure circular areas contain the larger natural elements - like the trees - and they are set apart thanks to the use of tree bark. The other components displayed in the area are from a colourful range taken from the Alicante landscape and backed up by the use of earth and stone from it.
In particular 'Jardin in the Marina Alta' plays with the colour balance blurring the differences between Pepe Cabrera's and Kandinsky's work as if it were coming together, an abstract combination between volume and line.
The connection between very rigid geometries, the garden and the traditional agricultural terrain is achieved thanks to a use of autochthonous species that follow a drip irrigation system. A practical and aesthetic coherence between private space and the landscape.
In this way, the steep slope serves as the line between the fruit trees and the tropical native wildlife, but not forgetting the other uses of space which provide the garden with a luminosity that connects the house with the garden and the surrounding fields, thanks to beacon lights which mark the garden paths, as well as illuminated stools and tables from Vibia.
Art, decoration and nature combined in this Pepe Cabrera project brings together geometry, order and vegetation due to knowledge of the terrain and respect for the essence of the Alicante coastal garden.
