Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz are one of the most iconic couples in the world of Spanish cinema and Hollywood. Both actors fell in love during the filming of Woody Allen's film Vicky Cristina Barcelona and married in 2010. Since then they have not separated and have gradually built a life together.
Javier and Pe have had two children, Leo and Luna, and they wanted to build a home for the whole family. Despite traveling a lot for work reasons, the couple had a prefabricated villa designed in San Agustín de Guadalix, in the Valdelagua urbanization. The architect of the house was Joaquín Torres and, now, some time after finishing it, he has decided to tell what the experience was like.
Torres has revealed in an interview on the TV3 program Col·lapse that working for Bardem and Cruz was a real hell. Torres affirms that they were demanding and non-conformist clients and that they were truly obsessed with confidentiality.
"It's not that they were demanding, because all clients are demanding. They held me responsible for what appeared in the press about them (...) The house had to be emptied so that no one could see them. (...) No "You can be the Oscar-winning actors of this country and not appear anywhere," he said.
According to Torres, it was an ordeal and the construction visits were "terrible", since they had to "empty the house so that no one would see them." Furthermore, they were very capricious: "They had chosen a 30-centimeter piece of wood from Porcelanosa. The tone was white, matte, broken. When everything was set, it didn't seem right to them and I told them that it was the tone that had been chosen. "All the wood in the house had to be replaced to put in another one."
Ultimately, the architect also explained that Penélope Cruz called him at five in the morning to talk about the work. "They think they have the right, that they are doing you a favor," he said.
