It’s not easy to classify a Time+Space holiday. For sure food and art play a big part. Then so do architecture, the Costa Brava coastline and even Barcelona.

There are several bit players but three key performers in this unique concept: the house itself, the chef and Salvador Dali.

At the hub of Time+Space is the newly built super villa Ses Vistes – this translates loosely as “what views”, an apt name if ever there was one given the property’s absolutely commanding panorama over the bay at Port Lligat and the coast stretching north to Cap de Creus. The eight-bedroom house combines Modernist Mediterranean architecture with local materials to create a user-friendly space that sits comfortably in the natural landscape. Channel 4’s Grand Design team will be kicking themselves for missing this one.

“My starting point was to protect the house from the Tramontana winds,” says the architect Fernando Torrent. “The positioning means that the cool back of the house and the warm south-facing front aspect creates a natural current through the property which eliminates the need for air conditioning.”

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Although several of the eight bedrooms are sparsely decorated, the living room looks poised for an interiors magazine photo-shoot. It is styled with arcing lamps, a Van der Rohe Barcelona chair, a grand piano and, most importantly, a round dining table. The seaward sloping views beyond the decking and infinity pool are terrific. Downstairs there is a cinema, sauna and art room.

So much for the bricks and mortar - there are splendid properties to rent all over the world. What guests relish particularly here is the food (a brilliant Michelin-starred chef cooked the meals while we kicked back) and art (a huge chunk of Dali’s oeuvre is on the doorstep). In fact, by the end of a four-day break the two seemed to have collapsed into each other, and the conversation and ideas flowed freely.

Culinary artist in residence is chef Paco Perez, the diminutive boss of the Miramar restaurant, located a few torturously bendy miles further along the coast.

This corner of Catalonia is a gourmet’s Eden with Perez’s alma mater El Bulli down the road in Roses, El Celler de Can Roca in Girona and Casa Nun in walkable-from-the-house Cadaques.

A Michelin-star holder in his own right Perez’s “vanguardia” cuisine celebrates both the sea and Catalonia in arty and playful plates boldly constructed from local ingredients. It would be too simplistic to say that he offers Dali in a dish but there are strokes clearly inspired by the Surrealist genius, who loved to drink cava rosa and devour sea urchins at Hotel Duran in Figueres.

“If you make a dish deliberately with emotion and feeling you can call it art or it’s cooking,” says Perez, somewhat enigmatically.

A true professional, Perez, who speaks just a sprinkling of English, is effortlessly in charge of an impeccable staff and rolls out the food for guests. The most lavish breakfast I’d ever seen featured scores of carefully crafted dishes including orange cake, duck’s eggs and ice cream from a soda-style siphon, and was attended by ageing villagers who had worked alongside and known Dali. There were tapas of anchovies (shiny and silver-flecked like the coastal rocks), seasonal wild mushrooms, gambas al ajillo and pimentos on the decking by a crackling fire. At lunches and dinners, where the dishes ranged from suquet, a simple Catalan fish stew, to bloody veined prawn carpaccio, the talk turned naturally to food and art, helped along nicely by the special guest artists Al & Al and superb local wines.

Such was the anticipation for each course that one guest commented: “It’s like sitting around trying a drug, waiting for people’s reactions.” This was certainly true for the sheep’s milk poured onto young lamb shoulder with copper-topped field mushrooms and the chef’s intensely light crèma Catalana.

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