Design
This Architect’s Beautiful Homes Solve the Problems of Modern Design
Spanish designer Fran Silvestre is making some of the best houses in the world by not giving up on simplicity.
Silvestre at the Balint House outside Valencia, Spain.
Photographer: Salva Lopez for Bloomberg Businessweek
In 2004, Spain was in the middle of a building boom of unprecedented proportions. Billions of dollars from cheap euro zone loans were flooding into bridges, opera houses, civic centers, and other municipal projects, and the country’s architects were hopping on what amounted to a gold-plated gravy train.
Not Fran Silvestre. The Valencia native left an apprenticeship in Portugal with the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Alvaro Siza and moved back to the coastal city to build gleaming white single-family houses. Small ones.