Cortijada Los Gazquez - Vida en 1000m. Parque Natural Sierra Maria Los Velez. Andalucia.

Less of a door, more of a doorway. It leads up to two of our guest rooms at Los Gázquez.

The design was copied from an older part of the house and used to distinguish between doorways which lead to staircases and doorways that lead to guest rooms on the ground floor.

The small painting on the left is by artist Kathryn Lynch from New York.

The wall mounted sculptures on the right are by Gordon Senior. They are part of a huge series of pieces called ‘Tools of un-known use’.

The floors are a mix of Portland cement and local white sand from the quarry in Vélez Blanco.

This is another doorway. It too leads to two further guest rooms.

We installed underfloor heating in the house. It seemed a good way to combat the potential of damp in walls made from such ephemeral materials as limestone and clay. It’s also an efficient way to heat the house as the floors continue to radiate warmth up to twelve hours after the fires in the boilers have gone out.

The painting on the right was picked up in India and is actually by a young fourteen year old Bangladeshi boy. It’s of a child Budda sitting on the veranda of a house with a grass roof. I think it’s one of the best pieces of art we possess. If you ever come and see it don’t assume it is naive, it isn’t. This is not art born of artlessness this is self knowledge.

This is the door from the reception to the walled garden or carmen. Mudéjar architectural styles included a carmen which had to have specific attributes, one of which was running water. Well that’s a luxury we don’t have. But we do have this old olive tree, mirror balls hanging from it’s branches. (Hence the glare). We have sculpture too with an installation by Gordon Senior at the foot of the tree.

The door design we copied from a house in Vélez Rubio. The traditional plank door would have made the room rather dark but a glazed door is perfect. It’s double glazed too as we are mindful to insulate the house all year around.

2010 is going to see Cortijada Los Gázquez offer itself as a location for film and photography. So, every now and then I shall pop a new interior/exterior shot of the house on the blog and on it’s own dedicated page.

If I remember rightly we bought this Tibetan door hanging in Sikkim whilst trekking up there. It’s possibly no coincidence that it fits this door perfectly.

This is a central point in the house we nicknamed Five Dials in memory of happy times spent in Covent Garden in what seems like eon’s ago. We built this staircase not only to access all areas, but also to work structurally in supporting the surrounding walls. It is re-inforced concrete and was cast in one piece.