Architect(s): Miel Arquitectos
Address: Calle Santa Lavinia, 79A, 07181 Calvià, Costa d'en Blanes, MALLORCA-BALEARIC ISLANDS, Spain
Latitude/Longitude: 39.543352,2.565083
Photographs: José Hevia
A hillside of Costa d’en Blanes is the location of this house which has views over the entire Bay of Palma. In the way in which the hanging gardens of Babylon built a domesticated natural environment, the Casa Forbes provides the necessary horizontality in this seemingly impossible terrain.
The outer enclosure of oblique steel slats cut kinetically sieves the landscape as you approach its entrance. After overcoming the bath of views that hides behind them, the vision escapes you towards the garden roof, a fifth façade that displays aromas and colors in concert with a paved solarium worthy of a glass of cava… per day!
To enter the house you have to dive through a staircase that descends to the main floor where the living room, dining room, terrace and Mediterranean merge to the calm rhythm of the stone that surrounds it: slabs of calcareous stone, white mares stone de cas busso and a wall of gabions from which corten steel cylinders emerge landscaped.
As a host, the kitchen welcomes you with a large oak island to prepare and converse while slightly isolates the access to the main room from the social area. It is on this floor where the owners’ house is housed, including their room – bathroom – dressing room, where awakening requires the absence of vertigo and one can shower with the sea in cinemascope.
On the opposite side of the floor, there is a lounge and dining room surrounded of terraces, a swimming pool and a vegetable and stone vertical garden.
The south terrace is hedonistic and exhibitionist, with glass railings to avoid any interference between the horizon and the house, even the pool has eyes towards the sea. On the other hand, the terrace to the north enjoys the intimacy that this stone-vegetal colossus of up to 5m high gives it, a wall that murmurs and listens.
A slab with a spiral dug and a group of lenticchias lamps carry out the immersion to the lower floor as a bank of jellyfish.
This last floor of the house is the gift of the owners to their family and friends, 3 en-suite bedrooms with a front terrace. The floor provides the ability to relax away from reality. On the buried side of this level are organized a warehouse, the wine cellar (tribute to the dispensers of photo reels), the machine room and the laundry with exit to the outside.
And on the outside, the reinterpretation of the Mediterranean forest that once stood on this hillside, born from an intact set of oaks, we extend corten steel stairs and compacted earth, draining gabion margins together with a combination of shrub and tree vegetation that support the restitution of the pre-existing forest.
This hanging garden is built with materials from the island, is powered by aerotermia reinforced with solar panels and controlled by home automation to get them to take a look at the sea, swim both in winter and summer, control their facilities at the touch of mobile and above all they feel Majorca in each of its corners.
Text description provided by the architects.
Structure advisory: Toni Casas
E&M engineering: Eduard Rodriguez www.erenginy.com
Quantity surveyor: Carme Aguiló Mora
Landscape: Daniela Sanchez & Antonio Zamora
Builder: Xarxa Homes
Contributed by Miel Arquitectos
