Fisherman House Transforms Old Boat House into Year-Round Escape by Sea
The Fisherman House is also a house located in Spain, designed in 2024 by Terra Coll Home. The cottage was originally a small boat house, built haphazardly alongside other boat houses, and situated about four meters from the sea on a small pebble and sand cove. The team sought to create a year-round Mediterranean escape that reflected a sense of spontaneity, naturalness, and connection with the sea.
A Secluded Mediterranean Escape
The Fisherman House is also a house located in Spain, designed in 2024 by Terra Coll Home. The cottage was originally a small boat house, built haphazardly alongside other boat houses, and situated about four meters from the sea on a small pebble and sand cove. The team sought to create a year-round Mediterranean escape that reflected a sense of spontaneity, naturalness, and connection with the sea.
Creating An Interior Landscape
The Fisherman House was built alongside other boathouses and was then designed as friends requested to become “a year-round Mediterranean escape”, said local studio Terra Coll Home.
According to the team, the house was transformed into a “place to reconnect with nature” – a romantic excuse for the often decorated fishing-style interior.
“There are intervals of light and shadow, with sunlight reflecting off the sea and seeping into the walls of the corridor,” Terra Coll Home said.
“We drew our inspiration from this coast and these experiences, and we wanted to create an interior landscape that reflected the same sense of being spontaneous, natural and connected with the sea,” it continued.
To achieve the desired effect, the studio lined the floors with a combination of sand and visible beach pebbles to encourage communication with bare feet.
Arranged in a sophisticated pattern, both the pebble flooring and micro-mortar finish are water resistant, aggregates that play off the building’s proximity to the sea and strength of the lively waves that may be heard when entering.
At the bottom of the house further from the sea, the walls were finished in a lime mortar prepared with coarsely ground sandstone aggregate, giving a deep “weathered” texture.
In other places, the team lime-washed the sandstone mortar to introduce more light but retained the rough texture.
“This creation presents a space where friends and family can gather, cook, and drink, with a stone counter passing through the wall’s openings to become a floating bar in the living room,” said the team.
Terra Coll Home looked back into the boathouse’s past to dictate the interior colour palette and arrange a “floated counter” that would host the spaces.
Echoes of the house’s arches also “translate” into the living room bench cushions, with similar sea foam colours that are tied by the structure’s location.
Intervention Under Limited Regulation
According to the team, the old-world nature of the house created a clear direction that signals the strong connection between the house and its surroundings.
“The location of the house, at the far east of the island, on the very edge of the rocky sea, creates a strong impression,” the studio continued.
“The old-world hand-built history of the boathouse also created a clear sentiment to honor the connection between the house and its surroundings,” the team added.
The unregulated areas that resulted were finished in rough stone waterproof mortar, full in natural warmth, an interior design nod to the original sandstone blocks that previously filled the exterior walls.
Despite efforts, the studio informed us that the updates made on the house in the 1970s stripped the house of much of its charm and history.
“Much effort was made to coordinate with the mayor’s office and act within the existing structure to best preserve what could be preserved and tell a new and new-old story in this boathouse,” said Terra Coll Home.
Other interiors that contain a similar fishing-themed interior include a “rustic” restaurant in Mexico by south architecture or a wooden holiday home in Portugal.
Photography by Salva Lopez
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