Story
One house, two people, one village.
The story of a name
Three syllables. Three meanings. One place.
In Valencian, ca means ‘house of’. In Spanish, casa is home. And salvia — sage — is the resilient herb that grows in the limestone cracks of the Aitana, asking little and giving much. Casalvia holds all three: a house of sage, a home rooted in the mountain, a name that carries the quiet languages of the valley.
When we found our 1950s building, the parallel was immediate. Like the wild sage of the valley, it had good bones and a resilient spirit: weathered, unhurried, still standing. We chose the name for what comes next: a house in the village, open again.
A sage home, in every sense of the word.
Who we are
Two paths, one place.
We are Diego and Jeroen. We met in Amsterdam more than ten years ago, and what started as a shared life became, in time, a shared plan. We will live in the village, at its pace.
Diego
Diego has spent twenty years in hospitality, most of them helping a Dutch hotel brand grow from its early days to cities on four continents. His work has always been about the same thing: using technology to take the friction out of travel, so the people and the place can do the rest. Born in Brazil, with roots in Italy and Spain and nearly two decades in Amsterdam, he has wanted a small hotel of his own since he was a child. At Casalvia, he looks after how everything works.
Jeroen
Jeroen is the founder of Studio Hermanides, an interior architecture practice built on what he calls timeless eclecticism. He judges a room by how it feels rather than how it photographs: layered, lived-in, with the old building as the starting point rather than something to cover up. At Casalvia he is designing every room, so that each one has a story of its own.
Why Sella
Close to everything, closer to the mountain.
We wanted quiet, without being cut off. From Sella the beach is twenty minutes away and the city less than an hour, but the days are set by the mountain, not the traffic. Here we will live closer to nature and more rooted in one place, and hospitality, which has always been our way of living, fits into that naturally. A house for guests on the village square is, quite simply, the life we want.
We chose the village as neighbours, not as investors.
Follow the project
We share the work on Instagram, as it happens.
Photos of the house, the village and the mountain as the work moves on. For anything else, write to us.