jordi herrero renovates casa montisión from historic mallorca building

layered history expressed throughout casa montisión

In Palma de Mallorca’s historic center, Jordi Herrero Arquitectos completes the renovation of Casa Montisión, a former ground-floor store transformed into a private residence. Positioned directly across from the Montisión Church, the project navigates constraints of scale, structure, and light to create a domestic interior rooted in restraint and contrast.

The existing L-shaped footprint connects two narrow streets, each providing modest access to natural light and ventilation. A small internal courtyard offers additional breathing room. The site’s original character — a high ceiling with a partial mezzanine — suggested potential, though the vertical clearance was limited. In coordination with a parallel structural renovation above, the architects lowered the main floor slightly, making space for a livable mezzanine level while preserving the building’s foundational integrity.

images © José Hevia

Staggered Volumes and Filtered Light

At the center of Jordi Herrero Arquitectos’ Casa Montisión, a stair links the lowered ground floor to two independent mezzanine bedrooms, each with a private bathroom. These sleeping platforms are set back from the exterior facades, creating a void that allows daylight from the tall entrances to extend deep into the interior. The resulting section creates a sense of spatial layering — each zone distinct but connected.

The ground floor, coated in continuous micro-cement, reflects ambient light and sets a neutral base for everyday use. Living, cooking, dining, and utility spaces occupy this level, arranged to accommodate both movement and pause without interruption. Despite the building’s compact envelope, the architects‘ use of light and volume generates a sense of calm expansiveness.

Casa Montisión is the conversion of a former store in Palma de Mallorca’s historic center

jordi Herrero arquitectos Honors Material Memory

Throughout Casa Montisión, the architects at Jordi Herrero Arquitectos preserve structural and decorative elements that spoke to the building’s layered history. Most notably, a pair of overlapping arches — remnants of earlier construction — were left exposed and integrated as visual anchors within the open-plan living space. Original beams and wall textures remain visible where possible, bearing witness to the building’s evolution.

Where intervention was necessary, materials were chosen for contrast and reversibility. Fragile sandstone walls were reinforced discreetly. New additions, most visibly the stair and mezzanine cladding, are constructed in oak, introducing a warm grain that softens the austerity of the exposed structure. These contemporary insertions are clearly legible against the backdrop of timeworn textures, framing rather than erasing the past.

the renovation by Jordi Herrero Arquitectos maintains the original L-shaped layout

To further temper the raw materiality of the space, the design team introduced textiles, curtains, plants, and indirect lighting. These additions do not mask the architecture, but instead mediate the experience of it, lending rhythm and softness. The goal was never to neutralize the contrasts, but to calibrate them, creating tension that feels intentional rather than unresolved.

In this sense, Casa Montisión shares a conceptual lineage with Herrero’s concurrent work on the renovation of Can Oliver into the Nobis Hotel, also in Palma. There, black steel replaces wood as the primary contrasting material, drawing an even sharper divide between old and new. In both projects, the approach refrains from imposing a dominant narrative; instead, it engages the existing conditions as a generative force.

set-back mezzanines allow natural light to filter through tall entrances