/// Housing renovation in Palma.
Author: Carles Marquès Barceló, architect.
Promoter: Private individual.
Years 2018-2023
This renovation project in Palma is based on a spacious flat from the 1940s, built with quality materials that we want to conserve and enhance, while adapting the house to contemporary uses. Carpentry in old northern pine, coloured hydraulic tile floors and marés walls. The layout was typical of a bourgeois family, with a separate kitchen, separate dining room and service bedroom. Numerous segregated spaces that together gave a labyrinthine sensation. The appearance of a building in the south had meant that much of the sunlight from the balconies had been lost, and everything had become gloomier.
The new layout redefines a new social space in the house where cooking, conversation, cinema, music and reading are shared. And by means of two strategies it manages to provide the necessary light and spaciousness. The first strategy is to interconnect the spaces creating one continuous space. And the second is to open and qualify the openings to give light to the interior. This is done by cutting out a wall here, enlarging a window there, giving rise to a collage of interventions that show the evolution of the construction and provide new uses, lights, places and corners where to live and enjoy.
The construction is carried out at different times, making the most of the existing elements, carpentry, tiles and even recycling the sandstone measures that are erected in one place and rebuilt in another. It is a low-cost work, simple technology and low energy expenditure.
