Home and Apartment Renovations in Mallorca: Architecture and Interior Design to Create Personality and Increase Value

Ses Coves, Santa Catalina and Baix des Cos 20 show how a well-conceived architectural renovation can turn an existing property into a contemporary, personal home with greater value.

Renovating is not replacing, but discovering a home’s potential

Renovating a home is not just about updating finishes, fitting a new kitchen or replacing installations. A full renovation can become a genuine architectural operation, capable of completely changing how a property is perceived, improving how it works and building an identity that did not exist before.

When architecture and interior design are planned together, every decision becomes part of a single idea: the layout, the light, the materials, the views, the relationship between rooms, the built-in furniture, the textures and the way you move through the home. The result goes far beyond a renovated house. It is a property with personality and, for that very reason, with a higher architectural, emotional and real estate value.

At Brunet Arquitectes, renovation is understood as a process of transformation in which the existing home must be understood first. Finding out what works, what should be kept, what can go and what possibilities remain hidden behind outdated layouts, false ceilings, cladding or interventions accumulated over time.

An old home may have a layout poorly suited to the way we live today and yet contain elements of enormous value. Walls, proportions, ceiling heights, original materials, courtyards, openings, structures or connections with the outdoors may have been hidden or underused. The architect’s work begins precisely with that reading.

Architecture and interior design: one idea of home

Before adding new elements, it is necessary to identify what deserves to stay. This difference is fundamental. A renovation based only on replacing materials can produce a home that looks new, but not necessarily a better one.

When there is an architectural project behind it, by contrast, the work addresses deeper questions: how light enters, how spaces connect, which routes disappear, which are strengthened and what relationship is established between the different areas of the house.

The available floor area can be exactly the same and yet the spatial perception can change completely. A home can feel larger without gaining square metres, be brighter without indiscriminately multiplying its windows and feel more sophisticated using few materials. It can even gain more personality by recovering precisely what was already there.

In a good renovation it is hard to say where architecture ends and interior design begins. The layout determines the furniture, the materials determine the light and the lighting changes how volume is perceived. A kitchen can become architecture, and a custom-built element can solve storage while defining the identity of an entire space.

For this reason, approaching architecture and interior design together makes it possible to achieve a level of coherence that is hard to reach when each decision is taken independently. It is not about decorating after renovating, but about designing from the start how you want to live.

P317 Ses Coves: transforming to build a new identity

Ses Coves is part of this way of understanding residential renovation as a global intervention. Every existing home presents different starting conditions and, precisely for that reason, a renovation should not try to impose universal solutions. Architecture must find what makes the property unique and work from there.

In single-family renovation projects, one of the biggest changes usually comes from reviewing the relationships between the different rooms. Many traditional homes were designed for ways of life different from today’s, with separate kitchens, many circulation spaces, closed rooms and a more limited relationship between inside and outside.

Today the domestic programme is different. Kitchen, dining room and living room tend to relate to one another, daytime areas require more flexibility and natural light matters more. There is also a search for visual continuity that lets you enjoy the architecture as a whole rather than as a succession of isolated rooms.

Renovation makes it possible to reinterpret this structure without necessarily erasing its past. Ses Coves represents that opportunity to use the project to achieve a home that is more coherent, more contemporary and, above all, more recognisable. Because a property gains value when it begins to stand out.

P245 Santa Catalina: the value of renovating in an established urban setting

Renovating an urban home raises a different set of questions. In an established location, architecture works within very defined limits. Orientation, party walls, structure and the position of openings shape the project, so every decision matters even more.

P245 Santa Catalina allows a particularly relevant reflection on renovating apartments and urban homes in Mallorca. In these projects, quality does not necessarily depend on having large areas, but on using them well.

Removing leftover spaces, simplifying circulation, connecting rooms, providing integrated storage and allowing light to reach deeper into the home can radically change how it is perceived. This is where architecture and interior design meet again.

When furniture is integrated into the project and certain elements stop being seen as independent objects, the space gains visual order. The home feels cleaner and more spacious, but also more personal.

Against the sameness of many renovations, architecture offers a fundamental advantage: creating a property with an identity of its own.

Baix des Cos 20: stripping back the architecture to recover its essence

The Baix des Cos 20 project expresses this philosophy particularly clearly. The intervention starts from a single-family house between party walls on a corner site and proposes a strategy that seems simple but is architecturally powerful: strip the building back and cover only what is necessary.

Instead of completely hiding the original construction under new cladding, the project recovers the existing materiality and makes part of it the protagonist of the new home.

The main volume and the materiality of the original exposed marés façade are retained, while inside the marés walls are also kept, with certain openings enlarged to create new relationships between rooms.

The intervention also reorganises the house around a central entrance space that works as both hall and dining room. A functional decision that is also a spatial one.

The home, of 114.33 m² spread over ground and first floors, shows that the quality of a renovation is not directly related to having a large floor area. It is related to knowing how to read it.

Opening up a view, removing a barrier, letting a material breathe, controlling the entry of light or keeping a texture that links the contemporary house to the original construction are decisions capable of transforming the experience of the home.

Baix des Cos 20 gains personality precisely because it does not try to erase its history, but uses it as material for the project.

Materials, light and continuity: building character without artifice

Mallorca offers an extraordinary material heritage. Marés sandstone, stone, wood, ceramic and mineral mortars are part of an architecture developed over centuries in relation to the island’s climate and resources. A contemporary renovation does not need to literally reproduce that architecture, but it can learn from it.

The interest lies in establishing a dialogue between existing materials and new elements. A marés wall can sit alongside precisely drawn joinery, an irregular surface can meet a contemporary element and an old texture can become the counterpoint to an extremely clean interior. That controlled contrast gives a home depth.

Among all the resources available in a renovation, probably none transforms a home as much as natural light. A new layout can allow an existing opening to light several spaces, a door can become a large opening, a view can run through successive rooms and a courtyard can stop being a secondary space and become the environmental heart of the house.

Working with light does not simply mean making windows bigger. It also means controlling orientation, shade, privacy and depth. In Mediterranean architecture this balance is especially important. A home must open to the outside, but also protect itself.

When these decisions are built in from the earliest stages of the project, light stops being merely illumination and becomes architecture.

A good renovation also protects and increases the value of the property

A property’s value depends on many factors: location, floor area, condition, views, orientation, market and demand. But among those variables there is another that is becoming more and more important: the quality of the project.

An architectural renovation can increase the value of a home on several levels.

First, from a functional point of view, because a good layout makes better use of the available square metres and eliminates useless areas.

Second, in terms of comfort, thanks to better installations, lighting, insulation and construction solutions adapted to contemporary standards.

Third, in terms of perception. A coherent, bright, well-proportioned property immediately conveys a sense of superior quality.

And finally there is a fourth value, probably the hardest to measure: identity.

In a market where many properties share similar finishes, furniture and solutions, a home with character is more recognisable. And what is recognisable has value.

A renovation may begin with personal needs, with adapting a family home, with restoring an inherited house or with a property investment whose potential depends on a prior transformation.

In all these scenarios, architecture makes it possible to take decisions with a broader vision, thinking not only about how the home will look when the works are finished, but about how it will function and age over the coming years.

Brunet Arquitectes: renovations with identity in Mallorca

Ses Coves, Santa Catalina and Baix des Cos 20 represent three different opportunities to transform what already exists. Three homes, three contexts and three ways of working with architecture and interior design.

But behind all of them lies the same conviction: a quality renovation does not begin by choosing finishes, it begins by asking questions.

What deserves to be kept?

What stops the home from working properly?

Where is the light?

Which route should disappear?

Which material can be recovered?

How do we want to live in these spaces?

Answering these questions properly makes it possible to transform a property without erasing what made it special.

Renovating a home in Mallorca does not have to mean turning it into something else. It can mean discovering the best version of what already exists.

And when architecture, interior design, materiality and functionality work together, the home does not just change its look: it gains personality, improves the way of living in it and strengthens its value for the future.

At Brunet Arquitectes we develop residential renovation and refurbishment projects from an integrated vision, combining architecture, interior design, technical management and project management.

Every home requires a different response. Our job is to find it and turn the property’s potential into architecture.