Gerard Bofill spent twelve years as an architect in Barcelona before deciding, almost overnight, that the buildings he most admired were the ones built without architects. He bought the farmhouse in La Garrotxa on a Tuesday. He handed in his notice on the Thursday.
Can Buch is a 17th-century stone farmhouse at the edge of a volcanic landscape. The Garrotxa Natural Park surrounds it on three sides. From the upper terrace, you can see six distinct shades of green — a fact that Gerard mentions not with pride, exactly, but with the quiet satisfaction of someone who made a decision and was not wrong about it.
The guests who come here don't need to be told how to slow down.
Can Buch from the lower field, late afternoon.
The house as position
Every room at Can Buch is different — not in a boutique hotel way, where difference is manufactured, but in the way of a house that has been changed by successive inhabitants over four centuries. The beams are original. So are the floors, where the stone has been worn into gentle hollows by three hundred years of footfall.
Gerard's partner Sofía leads foraging walks at dawn on most mornings. These are not scheduled events. They happen because Sofía genuinely cannot pass through the forest without stopping to notice things, and guests tend to follow. The walks typically last two hours. They sometimes last five. They always end at the kitchen table.
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Left: the stone kitchen. Right: the terraced garden.
What Gerard has built at Can Buch is not a retreat from the world. It is a position about how to inhabit it. The architecture teaches without instructing. The landscape asks without demanding. You arrive as a visitor and leave, if the place has done its work, as someone who has been somewhere.