About
A farmhouse at the end of a road that goes nowhere else
Solace opened in 2019 in a valley that had been quietly emptying for fifty years. Most of the work was repair rather than design.
01The house
What we found, and what we kept
The farmhouse was built in the 1830s and worked as an olive and almond holding until the 1970s, when the last family left for the coast. By the time we found it the roof had gone over the barn and the terraces had closed over, but the walls were true and the water still ran.
The rebuild took three years and was led by a small practice from the coast who mostly argued for doing less. We reopened the original window openings rather than cutting new ones, relaid the floors in stone from a quarry an hour north, and left the barn beams exactly as the fire and the weather had made them.
Three timber pavilions were added on the pine slope in 2022 — the only genuinely new buildings on the estate. They are raised on piers so the ground underneath them was never dug.
02Materials
Lime, stone, chestnut, wool
Lime plaster on every interior wall, applied by hand and left unpainted, so the surface moves in the light and takes on the colour of the hour. Limestone floors, honed rather than polished. Chestnut for the beams because that is what was already there, and larch for the villas because it silvers and then stops.
No plastic in the rooms that we could avoid. Wool blankets, linen bedding, glass bottles refilled from the spring line, soap made in Puerto Aldena and delivered in ten-litre drums.
It is a slower way to build and a more expensive way to run a house. It is also the entire reason the place feels the way it does.
03Hospitality
Four things we try to get right
- 01
Answer quickly, then leave people alone
Service here means being available within a minute and invisible the rest of the time. Nobody will introduce themselves twice or explain the property to you at length.
- 02
No timetable you did not agree to
Breakfast runs for three hours. Walks leave when the group is ready. There is no schedule of activities pushed under the door.
- 03
Say what is actually true
If the pool is cold, the ridge is closed in cloud or the kitchen has run out of something, we will tell you before you find out yourself.
- 04
Buy close to home
Food, wine, ceramics, soap, linen and labour come from within an hour wherever they can. It is not a marketing position, it is how a house this size stays possible.
04Where we are
Twenty-two kilometres from anything
Solace sits at 340 metres, near the head of the Serena valley, at the end of a single-track road that serves the house and two farms and then stops. Puerto Aldena is 22 kilometres down the valley; the nearest airport is an hour and twenty by road.
The valley faces south-west, which is why the evenings are so long here and why the olives ripen a fortnight ahead of the coast. There is no light pollution over the ridge and there is very little sound after nine.
The house in numbers
- Opened
- 2019
- Rooms and suites
- 14
- Original house
- 1830s
- Elevation
- 340 m
- Terraces
- 9 hectares
- Nearest town
- 22 km
Stay
The valley is quietest between October and April
Rooms are held for a day while an enquiry is answered. Write to us with rough dates and we will tell you honestly what is worth booking.
Camí de Serena 12 · Vall de Serena · 07190