One patio, two houses
Location: Esporles, Mallorca
Year: 2024
Architects: isla (Marta Colón de Carvajal, Juan Palencia)
Team: Cristina Gutiérrez, Chiara Liebermann, Silvia Fernández
Building surveyor: Jaume Roselló Alomar
Builder: Burmir Picapedrer
Carpenter: Fustería Migjorn
Photos: Luis Díaz Díaz
Status: Completed
The idea of renovating a house between party walls sandwiched between a small street and an alley changed radically when the opportunity arose to buy the neighbouring plot, a long piece of land measuring 25 metres long by just 2.5 metres wide.
The new patio
The fortunate purchase made it possible to open up a courtyard on the adjoining plot and large openings to the house in the dividing wall.
The extralarge exterior sliding door runs alongside the exterior side of the stone facade
The project then turned into imagining twenty ways of bringing light into both dwellings -sliding windows on the outside of the wall, vertical and horizontal pivoting windows, arched windows, round skylights, sash windows and lift-and-slide windows-.
Oculus inner view
Oculus outter view
In the main house the spaces are opened up, a former garage is converted into a living room, the kitchen is relocated beside the courtyard, a large game-room is opened up on the first floor, and the bedrooms are stacked with access to a terrace.
The stainless steel kitchen occupies the space between the new and the old patio
Inside-outside
Landing
Arrival to first floor
The stairs connecting the bedroom tower
The former garage (cochera), now the reading room
A pivot-window that opens to the patio, following the shape of the space.
The sofa adapts to the diagonal cut that connectsthis space with the patio
The playroom
In the elongated plot (`sa llonganissa´), a very narrow dwelling is rearranged by inserting the programme wherever possible, taking advantage of every centimetre of the width, the kitchen in the wall's shoring, and the bathroom between the two circulations parallel to the wall.
The ‘llonganissa’ kitchen takes up the entire width of the house
The lift-up window of the ‘llonganissa’ kitchen transforms it into a bar.
On the opposite side, a garage studio finishes off the south end of the courtyard.
The studio with the sash window that opens to the patio
Custom made floor
A local made palladian floor composed of slightly offset and displaced pieces dresses and ties the two dwellings together.
From the outside, the presence of the courtyard can only be sensed through the lattice of the garage-studio.
