Costa Rica's most distinctive gallery for original art, community, and bringing life to the spaces you live in. 

A full-service art experience helping you discover the right piece, artist, and story to transform your space.

Sol Gallery opened December 2024 with a simple conviction: that Guanacaste deserved a gallery that treated original art — and the artists who make it — with genuine respect and connection.

Curator. Artist. Interior designer. The heart of Sol Gallery.

Alex Starre is the reason Sol Gallery exists and the reason it works.

She is the co-owner, lead curator, and one of the gallery's most collected artists. An interior designer with over 20 years of experience, she built Sol Gallery around a life already full — four kids, a business partnership with her husband Gerrit, and a practice that has never stopped growing.

What makes her exceptional for this work is not what she already knows — it is how she pays attention. 

She comes to every space, every client, and every conversation without assumptions. What she finds there shapes everything that follows.

She reads the room: its scale, its light, its personality. She asks how you live in the space, what it means to you, and what you want to feel when you walk through the door. She pays attention to the things you might not think to mention: the way the afternoon light passes across a wall, the textures around it, the objects that are already there and what it says about you.

From that, she builds a curated recommendation. Not a catalogue of options — a considered selection that reflects the space and the person in it. Digital mockups can be created to show you exactly how a work sits in your room before anything is decided. There is no pressure. No guesswork. Just the right art for your life, chosen by someone who genuinely understands both.

She works with clients in Airbnbs, condos, private villas, luxury homes, boutique hotels, and new builds. The space changes. The quality of her attention does not.

When Alex comes to your home for a consultation, she does not arrive with a shortlist and a clipboard. She arrives with her full attention on you and your space simultaneously.

Named for the the sun and the alma of this coast, Sol Gallery was built on a single conviction: that the right piece of art can make a space feel alive.

In its first year, Sol Gallery earned something harder to manufacture than scale: a reputation. Built through word of mouth, events people still talk about, and a track record of getting it right.

We now represent over 40 artists from across Costa Rica and the international community that calls this coast home. We have placed hundreds of original works in homes, hotels, and businesses across the region and internationally. We have hosted packed events that brought together artists, collectors, nonprofits, and the wider Guanacaste community. The best is still ahead.

Sol Gallery exists to bring original art and the people who make it into closer contact with the community that surrounds them — and into the homes, businesses, and lives of the people who need it most.

We believe art is not a luxury reserved for the few. It is a language, a presence, and a force that changes how a space feels and how a person moves through it. 

Our work is to find the right piece, the right artist, and the right story for every space we touch — and to build a gallery that Costa Rica is genuinely proud of.

Every relationship at Sol Gallery — with an artist, a collector, a first-time visitor — is built on genuine attention. Not to move inventory. To make the right match.

Not behind velvet ropes, but on walls where people cook dinner, raise families, host friends, and build their lives. We curate for how people actually live.

Sol Gallery was built inside a community and is accountable to it. We partner with nonprofits, support emerging artists, and measure success by what we give back.

We don't tell clients what art they should want. We listen, we understand, we guide. Alex's twenty years of experience exists in service of that, not ahead of it.

It is the operating principle. Slow down. Pay attention. Choose beauty. Show up for the people around you. Build something that outlasts the hustle.

Every piece we place should carry genuine feeling. Not as an aspiration — as a requirement. If it does not move someone, it does not belong on the wall.

Alex grew up in Canada with a paintbrush in her hand and a designer’s eye for how things belong together. She spent two decades building a career in interior design, shaping homes across continents, and developing the instinct for what works in a space and why. Painting was always part of her, but life moved fast. The canvases waited.

When she and Gerrit made the decision to leave the familiar behind and move their family to Costa Rica, something shifted. The light here was different. The community was different. 

Gerrit encouraged her to pick up the brush again. Fellow artist Junior Rodriguez showed her what was possible. A few canvases later, she held a small solo show in Tamarindo.

Twenty-seven guests. Twenty-one sales. The painting that started it all — Rollin’ with the Tide, 2022 — stopped everyone who saw it. That was the beginning.

Sol Gallery grew out of that moment. 

In the years since, Alex has built Guanacaste’s largest high-end contemporary gallery and sold over 300 original pieces.

Sol Gallery is a family venture in the most literal sense. Alex and her husband Gerrit van Bruggen co-own and operate the gallery together, and their four children are woven into the fabric of everything they have built here.

Gerrit is the structure that allows Sol Gallery to function at the level it does. Where Alex is instinct, creativity, and human connection, Gerrit is systems, clarity, and the kind of steady confidence that turns a vision into a working operation. He comes from a background in coaching and leadership, and he brings that to everything from the business strategy to the day-to-day operations. 

Together, they made the decision most people only dream about: they left behind the comfortable and built something new, somewhere new, with four kids in tow. That decision was Guanacaste. Sol Gallery is what came out of it.

They left behind the familiar, committed to the rollercoaster of life together, and built something that now belongs to an entire community.

If you are building or designing in Guanacaste, Sol Gallery is the partner you have been looking for.

Alex speaks the language of developers and architects — scale, proportion, material, light, and the feeling a space should have when it is finished. She understands timelines, budgets, and what a luxury build actually demands. That is not a claim. That is a track record.

In Guanacaste, Sol Gallery has worked on projects from Nosara to Hacienda Pinilla and Reserva Conchal, up to the Discovery Land Company’s Zapotal development. We have curated for new builds, boutique hotel projects, and large-scale residential renovations. We know how to place art in spaces that have not yet been built, and how to coordinate delivery and installation when they are ready.

Trade inquiries are welcome.