In the heart of the Serranía de Ronda in Andalusia, Philippe Starck has designed LA Almazara, with Touza Arquitectos: an oil mill-museum that intertwines ancestral culture, design and territorial marketing, putting the spotlight on the region as a top destination in the international gastronomic tourism scene.
The work is a statement of love for extra virgin olive oil as a symbolic element of Spanish cuisine, here “reinterpreted” in an imaginative key between irony and sacrality – as Starck can do – with a lexicon free of interpretative labels, that encourages abandonment to surprise and imagination. “Always respectful and sacred, almost religious without being believing, with intelligence and emotion, LA Almazara is a great slap in the face that awakens, shakes up, enlivens, moves and pays homage to the olive and its oil”, comments Starck.
The building houses a functioning oil mill, a restaurant, a tasting area and a museum dedicated to the art of olive oil. A monolithic red concrete cube stands out in the Andalusian landscape with the indecipherable character of a surrealist work of art, where a smoke-spitting eye, carved into the structure, peers out and welcomes visitors. A huge steel bull’s horn, a giant half olive and a pipe from which water gushes, flooding a faceless statue immersed in a basin, inexplicably emerge from the construction.
Dining and Cooking