In the morning you wake up, you look at how the wind is blowing, what the sea is like, and you decide your day. «In Fuerteventura everything is linked to the climate»tells Martin Gatti. «It is a very harsh and wild island. It is not like Mallorca or Ibiza. Sometimes you see photos that look like the Caribbean, with crystal clear water and dunes, but that only happens a few days a year. When the calima (the sirocco wind from the southeast) arrives, the air is filled with dust and sand, and all the houses have to be closed. It is the longest of the Canaries and the least densely populated, partly uninhabited. It looks like Mars».
His buen retiro is located between a volcano and a calderaaround five or six houses at most. For the rest, only stones, earth and cactus. When Martín answers the phone he is in Paris. Co-founder of the Hunter & Gatti studio, from which he recently left to begin a more personal path, the fashion photographer divides his time between the French capital and Barcelona, his and his wife’s hometown, Arale Reartesan artist and photographer like him. «We always travel together, even though each of us has his own work. We spend some time in Paris and then we return to Spain. We go to Fuerteventura about once a month».
Their little house is in the north of the island, ten minutes by car from Lajares. «I am 35 square meters in totalwe couldn’t build more. I made the design myself with Photoshop, then I passed it on to a local company that made it”, he says Martín. «We have been going to Fuerteventura for many years, we like surfing. We wanted to have something of our own, so we bought this piece of land from a farmer. Actually we are designing another bigger house with the help of a studio in Barcelona: it will be beautiful because it will be hidden from the road thanks to a large terrace covered with cactus. But it will take time, and in the meantime we have built this ‘nano house’».
It’s small but it lacks nothing. The big test was during the pandemic, when the couple spent more than a year on the island. “The only problem is that you can’t bring many suitcases, there’s only one container under the bed and you have to be willing to live with two pairs of pants, the clean ones and the ones that need washing.” Not that it helps much, apparently. It’s summer all year round and after three hours of surfing in the ocean, the rest of the day is spent reading, cooking, watching a movie. “The great thing about having such a small house is that you’re outdoors all the time. And for dinner there’s no place we like better than our terrace. In Fuerteventura there are no great restaurants except Muana Mboka, owned by my friends Roger and Juan. They serve great fusion dishes in an African tent in the garden of their house, but it’s always full, you have to book way in advance.”
The interior of the house is designed as an open space, with a raised part that houses the master bed. The kitchen, as well as the bases of the sofas and beds, are made of plywood. «Many things are second-hand, like the chandelier Artichoke: I had bought it for another house but I didn’t like it and I brought it here. The clay table outside comes from the shop in El Cotillo that sells pieces made in Morocco, the plates and glasses we bought from Eguzkine, a ceramist from Lanzarote. Here you can’t really decide what you ‘want’ to have, you have to understand what you ‘can’ bring».
The style is Nordic-modernist and it is no coincidence that the whole thing reminds me a bit of California. «Los Angeles is the place I find most interesting for interior design. I went to photograph almost all the house-studios of the great architects, I love Neutra. His villas are incredible, especially because when you enter they do not convey an idea of luxury. This is an aspect that I cared a lot about for our house in Fuerteventura too, so I chose plywood, the cheapest material there is: once polished it becomes beautiful. You’re not in the mansion with the infinity pool and a Lamborghini parked outside. We have a ’78 Santana, it’s perfect for surfing.”
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