We are in Palma de Mallorca, on the boundary between the city and the woods. We were commissioned in 2017 to build a small house and studio. Approaching the site for the first time, we found almost the last plot on the street, the point where the street turns into a track, an unexpected landscape inside the city. The house-studio tries to bridge the old rural relationships with nature, setting out a new support on which to build a whole set of relationships born of the uncertainties of the present.

Because the plot is so small, the idea of a cabin emerged: a refuge that gives us warmth and shows us that we can live with less. Among the client's requirements, parking was essential, since parking on the street was impossible. Sometimes you have to park on the roof.

The resulting house arises to bridge the difference in level between the street and the plot itself, with the cabin peering shyly into the landscape. A timber cabin of reduced scale resting on a wall of sandstone (marés). The house-studio is built through simple, geometrically emphatic forms. It has two clearly defined spaces: a living room, kitchen and studio that opens onto the main courtyard, where water lives; on sunny days — many, over the year — that courtyard reads as an extension of the room itself and the reflections of the water tint the interior of the studio, so that it stops being a courtyard and becomes a living room. Finally the bedroom, reached by a staircase that means to disappear, giving the bedroom privacy against the public character of the house-studio.

Author

Mcatecnics

Photography

Alejandro Cañellas

Location

Palma de Mallorca, Mallorca

Date

2021