Martí Dehesa Mansion

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Civil architecture · Year: 1912 · Authors: Mariano Estanga

Nicolás Martí Dehesa, the owner who commissioned this building in 1912 from the architect Mariano Estanga, was one of the most significant representatives of the group that embraced the modernist artistic movement in Tenerife. From a wealthy class with strong purchasing power, he came to direct the power station supplying Santa Cruz. A traveller, he knew the forms and styles used in Europe at that time and immediately adopted them for his new residence facing Plaza de los Patos.

The mansion is undoubtedly the best building constructed by Estanga and the most outstanding example of Canarian modernism. Volumetric clarity, placement in specific areas of rich and exuberant decoration, formal honesty of the components that make up the general body of the work, and even details as specific as the modern bands of openings placed on the tower, are some of the characteristics of the property.

The interior decoration is one of the richest in Canarian domestic architecture. It features interesting accesses to the common areas and a spiral staircase where the start of the handrail is solved very originally by extending from the loop an Art Nouveau wrought iron candelabrum. The dining room, a semicircular space, is expanded by a series of narrow windows covered with imported stained glass that produce an interesting sensation of greater spaciousness throughout the space.

This building housed for years the headquarters of the Presidency of the Government of the Canary Islands.

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