Ca Na Lola was our home in Gènova, in the hills above Palma. Built in the 1950s as one of three neighboring houses, it gave us a modest footprint to work within and two porches that made the house feel considerably larger. Our work centered on the relationship between those spaces: how to bring daylight into the rooms, make everyday life comfortable and give the outdoor areas as much consideration as the interior.

We like materials that give us something to look at up close. At Ca Na Lola, lime plaster, wood, natural stone and tile brought different textures into a small amount of space. The pine doors had their grain and knots; the plaster caught the light differently across its surface. We paid attention to those details and to how one material met another. With the kitchen, dining and living areas sharing a room, everything was in conversation: a large sample could look convincing on its own and feel quite different once it sat beside the floor, a door or a piece of furniture. Those relationships mattered more to us than making every finish match.

On the main level, we kept the original pine doors opening onto the two porches and added double glazing. The wood was already part of the house, and improving the doors allowed us to keep that familiar presence while making them more comfortable to live with. Downstairs, in the little guest suite opening directly onto the garden, we introduced an arched steel-and-glass door. These were different answers to different parts of the building: working with the existing joinery upstairs and introducing a new opening downstairs, where the garden was immediately outside.

Ca Na Lola was also where we had to live with our own solutions. We knew why the sofa was that size and why the old doors were still there. Behind the photographs were all the small negotiations that come with making a home: what fit, what could be improved and what we wanted to keep. That is part of what we value about this house. It gave us room to be resourceful, and it made the work personal. We were designing the places where we would sit, eat, open the doors in the morning and spend our days.

The living area had a small niche for a sofa, and finding one that fit proved surprisingly difficult. The sofa we eventually chose was the only one we could find in the right dimensions; we then adapted it to make it our own. That little corner captures something of how we worked on Ca Na Lola. There were practical limits everywhere, and much of the design happened in the adjustments: taking what fit, seeing what could be changed and making it belong within the room. In a house this size, a few centimeters could decide whether something worked at all.

Photos by @iaiacocoiphotography and @espanyolet