An artist's retreat,
dreamed on a
flight home
Linda wanted a mountain home — somewhere to create, to rest, and to be around people she likes, without the city in the way.
She found the site in Altos de María, high enough that the air thins and the pines are the loudest thing you can hear. Then she drew the house herself, on an iPad, on the flight back from Croatia.
Espacio LAR designed and built it. We created the furniture with them: the built-ins, the beds, the wardrobes, the office. In a house with almost no interior walls, that furniture is doing more than furnishing — it is what separates one part of the day from another, and what gives rhythm to the space.
The plan is open throughout, so the furniture does the dividing.
— — Where did Casa Bor start?
"I wanted an incredible place, with beautiful nature, a fantastic view, and pines. The idea was to find somewhere calm where I could create, where I could paint, where I could give myself to art."
"Coming back from Croatia to Panama I had a flight of almost eleven hours, and I didn't feel like watching films. So I decided to design my house. I took my iPad and started drawing — to see what a place would look like where I felt most like myself. Calm."
— — And when you showed the drawings?
"They said, okay, show us what you've designed. They liked it. And from then on it was a love story. We understood each other, we complemented each other."
The plan is open throughout, so the furniture does the dividing.
The plan is open throughout, so the furniture does the dividing.
— — What was building it actually like?
"Building any house is usually a very intense process, very hard. There are a huge number of decisions that have to be made. But one thing I liked about building mine was that all those decisions were fluid."
"In the house I feel at peace. The sound of the pines can't be compared to anything in the world."
The plan is open throughout, so the furniture does the dividing.
What we made
Built-ins, beds, wardrobes and the office, each designed for the room it stands in so that furniture and architecture read as one thing rather than two. Drawn together with Espacio LAR, then cut, finished and installed by our own team.
Elsewhere in the house, the ceramic tiles were hand-painted by Linda herself, working with a local artisan and a traditional kiln — the kind of thing that makes a house impossible to copy.
The plan is open throughout, so the furniture does the dividing.
The plan is open throughout, so the furniture does the dividing.
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