A cleverly designed family home in Mallorca, Spain, combines technical architectural innovation with colourful traditional touches.

WORDS Robyn Alexander PHOTOGRAPHY Greg Cox PRODUCTION Sven Alberding/Bureaux

Sometimes it takes a true architect’s vision to imagine what a small and neglected property could become.

In this case, it took two: Alberto Sánchez and Aina Salvà of feinastudio.com. The owners of this totally transformed, light-filled family home in Palma, Mallorca’s capital city, are both architects. That must have helped because this project was no mere cosmetic update to an existing structure with easy flow or good bones.

Rather, the shift from ramshackle to remarkable required copious quantities of inspiration and insight as well as a healthy dose of sheer determination.

Alberto, who hails from mainland Spain, and born- and-bred Malloquín Aina have lived together on the island of Mallorca for 20 years. After time practising their profession in Barcelona and London, the couple decided they wanted a calmer place instead of a large metropolis. “To establish our own practice dedicated to small-scale architecture and interior design,” says Alberto.

The attractions of Mallorca included its strong sense of authenticity, he says, and the fact that it is a great place to raise a family.

They purchased this property that has become their family home in 2014, in Palma’s Son Espanyolet district. At that time, the area was still well known as an industrial area, says Alberto. “There were glass, rope and tile factories that employed a massive workforce, and the neighbourhood was planned as accommodation for those workers.”

Aina and Alberto had been immediately attracted to Son Espanyolet. “It’s the closest to the centre you can be, while still living in a house with a garden,” says Alberto.

Also appealing to the couple was the area’s sense of community, and the fact that everything necessary for everyday life is within walking distance, including the children’s schools and an excellent food market.
So they hunted for some time before discovering this property – a house “in a very deteriorated state” that was being sold by the extended family who had inherited it from their grandfather.

“The house only had one storey,” says Alberto, “and the garden had been colonised by lots of small sheds.” From the very beginning, the couple knew they wanted to enlarge the living space, and the only way to do so was by extending the house vertically.

Mallorca’s property development regulations were strict. “The boundaries were defined by the possible buildable volume,” explains Alberto. “The brief was less about floor plan and layout, and more about the way the house is built.”

As a result, in order to maximise the living space while also allowing for future flexibility in the floor plan, Aina and Alberto developed a solution that deployed a series of lightweight plywood boxes that, without overloading the existing ground-floor walls, would create the floors and the walls of the levels above.

From the dining room on the ground floor the system of plywood boxes with which the upper floors are constructed is clearly visible. The dining room, Alberto reveals, is his favourite place in the house.

An initial challenge was that the couple couldn’t find a carpenter willing to take on the project. Undeterred, they started their own timber workshop and did it themselves. “We bought a CNC machine and hired two carpenters,” says Alberto. All the resulting plywood elements were manufactured just three kilometres away from the building site.

As he explains, the creation of these elements was extremely contemporary in scope: the making process is digitised and highly technical – it had to be, in order to develop the prefabricated plywood elements in an efficient and effective way.

Also important to the architects, however, was the inclusion in the design of what could be conceived of as the opposite of this digitised, computer-driven process: Mallorca’s wealth of traditional skills in building and making. “There is still a variety of craftsmen on the island who use traditional manufacturing techniques for concrete and terracotta tiles.”

Aina and Alberto wanted to bring together these apparent design opposites into their home. “The boundary between what is handmade and digitally made was to be blurred,” says Alberto. “There would be no abrupt distinction, but rather a continuation of hierarchy of materials.”

Leaving the plywood in its raw state in the interior, he explains, was one way to ensure that the process of the digital craft was made visible and soften the contrast between contemporary and traditional forms of making.

Another priority during the build was an attempt to maximise the resources that were already in the house. Reusing materials – including stone from demolished interior walls, as well as window frames, handrails and doors – on the site was very much part of the ethos here, and its rewards were not just those of sustainability. The process of investigating old elements of the structure also led to moments of visual inspiration: for example, when carefully excavating old door frames, original paint colours were discovered, including the beautiful aquamarine shade that was then reproduced for the exterior window frames. Likewise, colours found in old kitchen tiles were deployed in the bathroom. Pops of colour enliven and enrich the interior design, with the new shades all carefully selected, Alberto says, “to complement and contrast with the found colours”.

Aina and Alberto’s two daughters each have their own bedrooms on the easily adaptable first floor of the house: this one includes a pair of beds, making it easy for friends to sleep over.

The main bathroom features a bathtub that was found in the original house and refurbished.

A mix of repurposed blue and patterned blue and white tiles adds a playful touch in the powder room, tucked into the space under the stairs.

The project was completed in 2016, and the family still lives in the house. The living, kitchen and dining
areas are on the ground floor and lead out onto a charming garden, complete with a pergola, swimming
pool and outdoor living spaces. Bedrooms contained within the plywood boxes are upstairs. Topping the
lot is a roof garden: “This helps us to maintain a stable temperature during the year, while making a sanctuary for bees,” says Alberto.

The final conceptual innovation in this home’s thoughtful design is that it was not intended to have a fixed and final layout. Instead, the idea was “to create a collection of good rooms with varied spatial conditions,” he says. Especially on the first floor, the layout can be modified relatively easily, according to the family’s changing needs. To start with, in 2016, for example, there were only two bedrooms on the first floor. “Our kids slept together and we had an open-plan bedroom in the middle of a large space.”

Today, however, the couple has a smaller south-facing bedroom, while their daughters now each have their own room. “It will probably change again when our girls leave for university,” says Alberto, “to adapt the house to a new family situation.”

Of course, the couple acknowledges that there are parts of the design that they would do differently now, having lived in the house for more than seven years. While they are grateful for the opportunity to live in a project designed by themselves, Alberto says, it does make you aware of all the improvements to be done next time. “It was a great learning experience.”

They are very clear that the best thing about creating their own house has been that they could try out radical solutions that a client would be more reluctant to do if they had not been previously tested. And given the sense of everyday enjoyment that this innovative house exudes, it would probably be a very good thing if it inspired many more family homes.