Son Martorell restores an 1886 rural estate in Menorca through selective demolition, material recovery, and carefully differentiated new insertions. The project reconnects a fragmented farmhouse, former cattle barn, and agricultural landscape while retaining the visible evidence of repair, use, and decay accumulated across the estate.
Son Martorell Technical Information
- Architects: idearch studio
- Location: Menorca, Spain
- Gross Area: 474 m2 | 5,102 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years: 2017 – 2026
- Photographs: © Maria Missaglia
The intervention works with what remains, revealing its latent programmatic, material, and landscape potential.
– Syra Abella Bule and Joaquin Mosquera Casares
Reading the Rural Estate as a Layered Landscape
Son Martorell occupies a Menorcan lloc, a rural holding in which architecture cannot be separated from agricultural territory. The main house and former cattle barn sit among dry-stone boundaries, gravel courts, farm tracks, mature vegetation, and prickly-pear hedges. Rather than treating the restored house as an autonomous domestic object, the intervention retains this dispersed arrangement. The pool enclosure, outdoor rooms, paths, and annex extend the inherited logic of occupation across the site, while remaining subordinate to the field walls and existing topography.
This territorial reading is particularly evident in the approach. Dry-stone walls lead toward the white and stone gable, establishing a sequence in which the building appears as one component of a wider cultivated landscape. The grounds are not smoothed into a generic garden. Gravel, scrub, wild olive trees, palms, and rough retaining walls maintain the agricultural texture of the estate, while shaded porches and exterior alcoves translate the practical need for shelter into inhabitable outdoor rooms.
Climate structures the plan as much as the existing walls. Living, dining, and outdoor spaces open southward toward light, views, and the terrace, using large glazed openings and an arcaded threshold to mediate between house and landscape. On the northern side, more recessed service and wet areas form a protective buffer against the Tramontana, the strong prevailing wind of the island. Smaller, deeper-set openings on these elevations reduce exposure while preserving the thick-walled character associated with Menorcan rural construction.
The Useful Ruin: Selective Demolition and Material Recovery
The restoration begins not with reconstruction but with subtraction. Compromised roofs, slabs, and non-structural partitions were removed, exposing a stable framework of mares stone walls. This process addressed the building as a useful ruin: incomplete, altered, and materially uneven, yet capable of supporting a new domestic order. The retained masonry operates simultaneously as structure, enclosure, and historical record, preserving evidence of former openings, repairs, and successive changes to the house.
The exterior makes this approach legible. Exposed masons’ ashlar remains visible across the upper portions of the gable, where weathered blocks, patches, and tonal variations record the building’s long alteration. White lime render repairs lower areas and flanking walls, but the meeting between stone and render is deliberately irregular. Rather than producing a seamless facade, the ragged seam identifies where conservation has given way to replacement. The result avoids both archaeological fixation and cosmetic homogenization.
Other elements continue this measured relationship with local construction practices. Clay barrel roof tiles restore the familiar pitched silhouette of the rural house, while deep-set punched openings acknowledge the mass and thermal inertia of the stone walls. A stepped zigzag relief at the rendered corner recalls the toothed geometry of traditional masonry quoins without pretending to be original stonework. Dry-stone walls and local lime-based finishes further extend the estate’s material vocabulary, but their use remains tied to repair and continuity rather than stylistic reproduction.
A New Circulation Core Within the Existing Masonry
The principal spatial transformation is a double-height entrance hall inserted at the center of the formerly divided house. Previous alterations had split the building into two independent units, weakening its spatial coherence. By clearing partitions and opening a vertical void, the project restores a shared center of gravity. Arrival, ascent, visual connection, and access to the upper rooms are brought together within a single volume rather than dispersed across narrow corridors and residual passages.
A folded Corten steel stair rises through this void alongside a retained Mares stone wall, then continues as a first-floor walkway. Its thin plate construction, open treads, and vertical rod balustrade establish a clear contrast with the rough, load-bearing mass of the existing fabric. The stair is not concealed within the renovation. It is treated as a precise contemporary insertion, separated from the masonry through shadow gaps and controlled junctions. This distinction allows the stone wall to remain visually present as a structural remnant rather than becoming a backdrop for a conventional interior finish.
Elsewhere, new openings cut through the thick walls establish direct relationships between rooms. The ground floor unfolds as an enfilade of living, dining, and kitchen spaces, with views extending through interior thresholds toward the southern arcade and cactus-lined terrace. Circulation becomes an experience of aligned openings, changing light, and framed landscape rather than a sequence of enclosed hallways. The southern loggia reinforces this continuity, placing new white arches in front of older stone arches and creating a layered threshold between domestic occupation and the open estate.
Material Temperature and Domestic Program
The project organizes its interior atmosphere through a simple material sequence. Polished concrete runs across the ground floor, creating a continuous, durable surface suited to the house’s public and landscape-connected spaces. Its pale grey tone provides a restrained base for the exposed stone, white plaster, and timber furnishings. Upstairs, terracotta hydraulic tiles shift the atmosphere toward a more enclosed and domestic register. Their brick-red color and square format correspond with the bedrooms, landing, and terrace, while also recalling the clay-based materials of the roof and surrounding soil.
More concentrated color is reserved for service spaces. The kitchen uses sage-green lacquered tall cabinetry and darker base units against pale stone worktops, giving the room a distinct identity without extending that palette through the rest of the house. Bathrooms are treated as more intensive material chambers, with glazed terracotta tiles or cream stack-bond ceramic surfaces defining the walls. These zones accept water, maintenance, and storage as architectural conditions, using tile, timber shelving, and black metal fittings to create robust, legible interiors.
The former cattle barn remains an independent annex with a rougher spatial character than the main house. Its mares walls are left exposed, and a large semicircular masonry arch continues to structure the room. Polished concrete and a white-boarded beamed ceiling provide a minimal framework for new use, while restrained furnishings and a black steel stair avoid competing with the existing stonework. The barn therefore resists full domestication. It retains the scale, texture, and material gravity of an agricultural structure, making the difference between inherited fabric and new occupation explicit.
About idearch studio
idearch studio is an architecture studio based in Madrid, Spain, founded in 2009 by Syra Abella and Joaquin Mosquera. Working across residential, commercial, office, and public projects, the studio develops architecture and interior design with a focus on clear identity, simplicity, and the essential values of architecture.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Bernabeu Ingenieros
- Construction company: Construcciones Valcarcel y Mendez
- Quantity surveyor and construction manager: Diego Florit Martinez
- Photography: Maria Missaglia
- Studio portrait photography: David Zarzoso
