Souvenirs are often dismissed as novelties, even clutter when they start to accumulate: postcards, magnets, snow globes, small ephemera that compress a place into something portable. But at their best, souvenirs do something deeper. They retain the sense of a destination after the moments have faded. They hold atmosphere, exaggeration, imagination and longing in one condensed object. Cateto Club, an experimental hospitality space on Spain’s Costa del Sol, extends this logic to architecture itself. It’s not a copycat, nor a purely nostalgic revival. It is a spatial memento built from memory, pleasure and the vernacular imagination of a coast that once understood leisure as an architectural language.
The project is based on a particularly charged chapter in Spanish design history. In the 1960s, the Costa del Sol became a scene of tourism, escapism and carefully crafted freedom. The clubs, hotels and roadside landmarks along the N-340 were designed to be seen, photographed, remembered and mythologised. Their facades flirted with spectacle while their interiors offered refuge from a more restrictive social reality. Each installation created small spaces of sensuality, color, music and liberation. Cateto Club looks back at this world without flattening it into pastiche. And in doing so, designer Alejandro Kateto it offers souvenir architecture the same cultural dignity as its peers.
The Cateto Club openly acknowledges the influence of Mario Bellini, Verner Panton, pop futurism and radical Italian design, but places these references alongside local leisure architecture: the Aqua-Tec diving club in Fuengirola, the brutalist Three Towers of Torremolinos, the Ciudad Sindical de Vacaciones rope, such as the Marugha language places, the Marbella Club and the Hotel Miami. Here, high design and vernacular architecture are in a powerful design dialogue.
This act of equivalence gives the work its power. Architectural history often reserves seriousness for famous authors, collectibles and polished movements, while the architecture of tourism, nightlife and local pleasure is relegated to the realm of kitsch or scenery. The Cateto Club rejects this distinction, arguing that the buildings people remember most vividly are not always academically approved. They may be marked by a strange roadside entrance seen through a car window, the strange door to a club, the textured wall of a patio, or the neon-lit threshold between everyday life and temporary abandonment. These spaces shape collective memory precisely because they are hyperbolic, concrete, and emotionally legible.
The work’s organizing gesture is the scroll, explored with an almost obsessive focus. It appears as a void in the seat alcoves, as a mass on the bar and stools, as a threshold in doors and openings, as a pattern throughout the ceramic floor and as sculptural lighting in the Sentry Sculpture Light designed by Ewan Lamm for Ultramar Studio. The form is both primitive and futuristic, soft and monumental, domestic and theatrical. It also allows the project to avoid superficial theming. Instead of applying retro references as decoration, Cateto Club turns geometry into a spatial language, one that can move between furniture, architecture, ornaments and atmosphere.
The circular entrance door is the clearest expression of this language. At three meters in diameter, it is impossible to ignore, knowingly theatrical, and almost cinematic in its frontal power. Its monumentality is not heavy or institutional. It’s playful, almost flirty. It nods to the old facades of the nightclubs of Montemar and Torremolinos, where the architecture functioned as roadside theater, luring passing drivers with exaggerated forms. In today’s hospitality landscape, where so many interiors are optimized for algorithmic recognition but somehow end up visually interchangeable, this audacity seems newly radical.
Photo by Loveladrillo.
