The multi-faceted interior designer, hotelier and founder of Ksar Living has spent decades in Ibiza, where he curates layered, luminous and soulful homes for the island's international community.

&lsquo;I was born in <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/food/best-restaurants-tapas-bars-barcelona" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Barcelona</a> in 1966. My parents are both Spanish but we emigrated to Holland when I was five years old, like a lot of families from Southern Spain in the early 1970s. My father took a job at the Amstel factory and I was raised in Amsterdam. I spoke Spanish at the kitchen table with my family but Dutch is my natural language. I was a creative child, very curious, and Amsterdam in the 1970s and &lsquo;80s was a great place to grow up. When I was 20 I was ready to spread my wings and I accepted an invitation to travel to India as a fashion stylist for the label Humanoid, who were shooting a catalogue there. I landed in Goa and my god what a place that was in those years! It was the trance era and it seemed like life was a non-stop party on the beach - everybody was off their face. I met so many crazy characters, including [founder of Ibiza&rsquo;s Bambuddha Grove] John Moon, who hosted a wild party at his house for days. I took every kind of drug under the sun that month, and when I came back to Amsterdam, my friends were all asking me, where have you been? You look so strange! But I had tasted complete freedom and I wanted more, so I spent eight or nine months in Amsterdam then went back to India.&nbsp;
My idea was to travel through the north of India, far from the party scene of Goa. I was alone, and I was very interested in meeting a spiritual master. I had had quite enough of getting stoned, but I was deeply into <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/ibiza/the-healing-arts-in-conversation-with-dipika-wishart" target="_blank" rel="noopener">spirituality</a> and I hoped to find a guru or at least a lovely ashram to stay awhile. I spent three months travelling all over India and I visited many, many ashrams, but I didn't find the master that I was looking for. What I did find, however, was a small atelier in Delhi where they were doing hand embroidery for the likes of <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/fashion/chanel-spring-summer-2024-the-joy-of-living" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Chanel</a> and Prada. Because I liked fashion so much I thought, &lsquo;I&rsquo;m going to sit here and learn how to do it myself.&rsquo; It was in the period of Dynasty, when women were wearing all these heavy, embroidered, sequin dresses, and I decided to make my own small collection. I created a sequinned chiffon singlet and some embroidered t-shirts to wear with jeans and heels. Very haute couture, but for daily life! Over the next three months I added a couple of dresses and then I was ready. I called my label Zon and I headed directly to Harvey Nichols. They loved it! So, Harvey Nichols was my first stockist, closely followed by Biffi in Milan. From then I felt unstoppable. For the next nine years I lived three months in India, three in Europe and so on, but by the time I was 30 I had had enough of fashion. I returned to Amsterdam and got a job designing costumes for theatre and opera. It was very beautiful and around that time I met my wife, Yvonne, and we fell in love. We were married after six months and I told her there was no way I was going to stay in the Netherlands. Yvonne had a beautiful old finca in <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/ibiza/the-bohemian-bolthole" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ibiza</a>, in the mountains near San Juan, so we decided to move here.&nbsp;

Alberto and Yvonne photographed by Sayana Cairo

Alberto Cortes photographed by Sayana Cairo

San Juan 25 years ago was amazing. It was still the <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/ibiza/peace-and-love-and-protests-the-evolution-of-ibiza-s-hippies" target="_blank" rel="noopener">hippy era</a> and there were so many wild parties going on in the forests, especially at Full Moon. Yvonne and I would wake up in the night and hear music, so we&rsquo;d hop in our Mehari and set off driving through the forest looking for the party! People still slept under the trees and on the beaches in those days and it was so much more inclusive. Rich and poor, aristocrats and hippies &ndash; we were all a big family and everyone shared everything. It was a special time. Yvonne and I were so enamoured with Ibiza, but we are also workaholics and we thought &lsquo;what are we going to do?&rsquo; We decided to buy a medium-sized property and renovate it for holiday rentals. Back then all the beautiful holiday homes had six or seven bedrooms &ndash; there was nothing of a modest size with a five-star finish. We started by renovating a fabulous loft in <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/ibiza/like-living-inside-a-poem-annie-doble-s-guide-to-her-dalt-vila-neighbourhood" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dalt Vila</a>, then we bought a three-bedroom villa and rented it out and slowly, slowly, we were creating a small portfolio &ndash; this was the start of Harissa Villas. Shortly afterwards, we discovered Cala Carbo and started to buy houses there. We had no problem filling the houses because we knew all the Dutch celebrities and they started asking me, can you find me a villa? And can you renovate it?&nbsp; And you decorate it? Because we love your style. I actually started <a href="https://ksarliving.com/">Ksar Living</a> in Cala Carbo, a funny place to have an interiors showroom but everybody from all over the island would come to see me.&nbsp;
Later we went to Morocco to buy carpets and lamps for Harissa and immediately we fell in love with Marrakech and the riads.&nbsp;We were supposed to go to the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara but we never left Marrakech. We ended up buying two riads and one became <a href="https://www.ryaddyor.com/">Ryad Dyor</a>. The same thing happened in Bali. One day I was walking through San Juan and I noticed a little alleyway that I&rsquo;d never explored before. I entered and I saw this beautiful house there without a roof. I thought, what the fuck? You know, this is an amazing, beautiful property. The biggest house of the village &ndash; the old school, in fact, without a roof. I love renovating old properties, so I managed to buy it from the old lady and then &ndash; along with Lars and Rosa, our neighbours from Cala Carbo &ndash; we created the Giri Residence. Just around the corner was a funny little shop, a sort of bazaar that had been very famous in the 1970s for selling Indian artefacts and a lot of hashish. The rent was coming up so we took it and opened the <a href="https://giricafe.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Giri Caf&eacute;</a>. Last year I took over the old Hostal <a href="https://garedunordibiza.com/">Gare du Nord</a> and I&rsquo;ve renovated that, super chic, but still very reasonable.&nbsp; I feel like I have really evolved with San Juan. Twenty-five years ago, the village was full of hippies but then for many years, it was very quiet. Now we have the <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/ibiza/the-best-autumn-markets-in-ibiza" target="_blank" rel="noopener">market</a> on Sundays, the music, the cafes &ndash; it&rsquo;s a beautiful village and I still live there. Ibiza is always changing but I think that&rsquo;s very normal. Everyone and everything around you is changing constantly and it&rsquo;s nothing to be afraid of.&nbsp;
I still love this island deeply and - because I'm a workaholic - I am very happy that I've been able to have a career here. I'm a very creative person and Ibiza has given me endless opportunities to explore and develop that. In design terms, I like that Ibiza is an island of second homes, because in a second home, clients want to&nbsp; live differently than in their big apartment in Paris or their townhouse in London. That suits my style, which has always been very eclectic. That's why I mix cultures together: Africa, Indonesia, India, but also with Italian colour and quality. It&rsquo;s such a pleasure to see clients in the showroom in the morning then stop for a lunch at El Bigotes or El Carmen or <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/people-of-ibiza/people-of-ibiza-mouji-longhi" target="_blank" rel="noopener">La Paloma</a> and see friends, in nature and in the sun. It&rsquo;s an extraordinary privilege to live and work like that. I'm 57 now and I was 33 when I came here. I used to go out all the time, every night I was in the nightclubs or at a party. Now, I don't go out that much, but I still do sometimes. On the first of January this year I was the last to leave <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/music/antonio-carbonaro-interview-circoloco">DC-10</a>! I love music you see, and I love to dance. In Ibiza I never stop dancing.&rsquo;

People of Ibiza: Alberto Cortes

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