If you’re reading this article, chances are you’re doing so within city limits. It’s the creative curse, as some would argue. There are no greener pastures than the asphalt jungle for the innovative spirits of architecture and design. And yet perhaps you’re occasionally struck by the sinking feeling that urban havens from conformity aren’t perfect. It could be the stress: the lack of personal space, the high cost of living, the professional competition.
In response to the pressure-cooker environment of Madrid, Olivier Potart and Ana Ibáñez opted out of city living altogether. They resettled in the remote Patagonian outpost of Puerto Natales, in Chile, where they had vacationed in 2003, and tapped Santiago architect Sebastián Irarrázaval to design the Hotel Indigo Patagonia. In response, the architect channelled the husband and wife’s respect for their adopted home as well as their tenaciously urbane tastes. The contrast between the Indigo’s vernacular exterior and the interior modern abstraction of Patagonia’s rugged end-of-the-world landscape is just one surprise in Irarrázaval’s studied achievement.
Most Puerto Natales tourists don’t stay for long. The provincial town is the gateway to Torres del Paine, a highly renowned national park where the namesake granite towers crash into the Patagonian steppe. Each year, 10,000 more visitors than in the previous one fly to Santiago, the capital, transfer planes en route to Punta Arenas, then endure the three-hour bus journey to Puerto Natales. From there, another bus takes them to the park entrance, where they can choose between day hikes or week-long treks.
On that first holiday, Potart and Ibáñez met Hernán Jofré, a commercial engineer and kindred spirit who had moved to Puerto Natales to pursue his interest in mountain climbing. By April 2005, the friends were trying to hatch a business – but how to capitalize on their (and the tourists’) metropolitan cool as well as the main attraction of the park? “The three of us agreed that a cozy, cool and nice place to stay – the place that we would like to find – didn’t exist in Puerto Natales,” Ibáñez says. After a wine-fuelled fireside chat, the trio purchased a triangular 400-square-metre plot and an adjacent wood-shingled house overlooking Última Esperanza Sound and the surrounding fjords. When an architect friend said he was too busy to design the Indigo, they held a small competition and invited Irarrázaval at the friend’s suggestion. The 29-room boutique hotel, on whose interiors Irarrázaval and Ibáñez collaborated, opened last December.
Although Irarrázaval, at just 40, is regarded as an architectural voice for post-1990 democratic Chile, he had never ventured to the country’s southern tip before this project. He visited three times to complete a design that, as Ibáñez puts it, “didn’t break the equilibrium of the town, although the hotel would become the first tall building in the area.”
In Puerto Natales, fitting in with the neighbours meant building a simple volume out to the lot lines and punctuating it with equally straightforward fenestration. Irarrázaval noted how the houses and fleecing mills in this far-flung locale differentiated materially between their primary and secondary elevations. The street-facing facades are wrapped in corrugated steel, which withstands the region’s temperamental gale-force winds and shows off a handsome visage to passersby; the longer side elevations are turned over to less costly timber planking. He did the same for the Indigo, specifying corrugated steel and pine planks.