When you live in a small village, you get to know all your neighbors as well as every house on its streets. After designer Serge Castella and his business/life partner (34 years and counting), Jason Flinn, decided to sell the farmhouse they had restored and occupied in the tiny Spanish Catalan town of Rupià, they knew they wanted to remain there.

“Nothing was for sale in town, except what might be called an ‘ugly duckling,’” says Castella, known as much for his interior designs as he is for the fine mid-century Continental antiques and furnishings he amasses and markets. “But when you see a place, it talks to you, tells you what to do with it. The right house guides you.”

That house, which had long languished on the market, is now the couple’s primary residence. The circa-1972, three-level brick dwelling was an anomaly in the village, whose housing stock consists mostly of residences centuries older and far more modest in scale—apart, though, from the many manor houses that figure into the townscape and that had once served as homes for senior clergy and members of the merchant class. During the long and repressive dictatorship of Francisco Franco, this region of Spain, the Empordà, remained largely dormant.However, when Franco died in 1975, the town, as Flinn relates, was rediscovered, especially by weekenders from Barcelona (an hour away). The very material of the house, brick, made it stand out, as well as its modern profile on a hilltop.

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INTERIOR DESIGN BY SERGE CASTELLA AND JASON FLINN

ARCHITECTURE BY RAMON ATAL

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MANOLO YLLERA

WRITTEN BY DAVID MASELLO

This story appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of MILIEU.