The Low-Maintenance Getaway
Architect John Hix conceived a Puerto Rico vacation home that celebrates both modernism and the Caribbean.
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Textile designer Donna Gorman and Swedish-born financier Roger Johansson discovered the empty, pristine beaches and bucolic countryside of sleepy Vieques, Puerto Rico, in the mid ’90s—back when two-thirds of the island was still used by the U.S. Navy as a site for live-ammo maneuvers. Five years ago, the couple having married and the Navy having decamped, the pair bought a one-and-a-half-acre parcel on the island’s pastoral south side, overlooking grassy hillsides where wild horses graze and a sliver of the blue Caribbean beyond.
“We bought the land but didn’t really have a plan for building a house,” says Gorman, who spent more than two decades at the legendary Finnish design house Marimekko. “But we knew that whatever we built, John Hix would design it.”
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