Inside Salvador Dalí’s eccentric Portlligat home

Salvador Dalí’s eccentric Costa Brava home is the subject of ‘Casa Dalí’, a new book published by Apartamento with photography by Coco Capitán and testimonials by Spanish architect Òscar Tusquets, who worked with the artist on design pieces for BD Barcelona. 

Salvador Dalí's home, photographed by Coco Capitán

Dalí bought it in the 1930s, a small fishing hut in the Mediterranean village of Portlligat, and with his wife Gala he worked on the building over the following decades to redesign and expand the compact structure by incorporating several adjacent huts into the house. Living and working from the house in the second half of his life, Dalí produced some of his best-known artworks at Portlligat, injecting the paintings with the light and atmosphere of the Spanish coast. 

He described the house as ‘a real biological structure [...]. Each new pulse in our life had its own new cell, its room.’ Since the artist’s death in 1989, the house has been preserved by the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, who operate the space as a museum, keeping the interiors and ground as the artist left them. 

The house is built as a maze, with narrow corridors and level changes throughout, as well as windows of different shapes that overlook Portlligat Bay. ‘Portlligat is the place of production, the ideal place for my work,’ said the artist. ‘Everything fits to make it so: time goes more slowly and each hour has its proper dimension. There is a geological peacefulness: it is a unique planetary case.’

The house is filled with furniture curated by Gala, objects collected by the couple of the years they spent there, and Dalí's artworks. Capitán's photography throughout the book captures the intimacy of the home while highlighting the extraordinary artistic value of the place. 

A text by Tusquets introduced the book, where the architect looks back to his friendship with Dalí. ‘Everything he said was subjective, you could agree or disagree—though, I admit, when he talked about art, I tended to agree—but it always made you think’, Tusquets writes in the text. ‘He was original, brilliant, and tremendously good fun’.

Casa Dalí is published by Apartamento