Casa Tramuntana
OHLAB presents a house that retreats from the urban landscape to inhabit the mountain through a silent, fragmented, almost buried architecture. Rejecting protagonism, it proposes a way of living that cultivates a dialogue with the terrain and redefines the relationship between nature and domesticity.
Set into a mountainous slope within a residential area on the outskirts of Palma de Mallorca, this single-family home is partially concealed from the street and carefully integrated into the landscape. The project adopts a deliberate attitude of retreat: it turns its back on the city and the sea, opening fully to the mountain, seeking southern orientation, forest privacy, and a direct relationship with the topography.
Rather than imposing itself on the terrain, the house adapts to it. The programme is broken into five units — kitchen and dining area, living room, bedrooms, studio, and pool — laid out as stepped platforms that follow the natural slope. This strategy reduces excavation, preserves existing vegetation, and allows each volume to engage with its own portion of the landscape.
At the centre of these volumes emerges a communal space that functions as the heart of the project: an open patio that captures a piece of the existing mountain. The house operates as a system. This organisation promotes a topographic reading of inhabitation, where uses are distributed according to the logic of the land. Private areas remain separate yet connected. Architecture builds relationships, not just spaces.
One of the project’s most eloquent gestures is revealed in its vertical surfaces, both interior and exterior: terrazzo panels made from a mixture of cement and stony aggregates that evoke the colour, texture, and density of the rock found on site. Standing three metres tall and ten centimetres thick, these elements are cut with deep mechanical grooves and fractured manually with a hammer, producing orthogonal and Cartesian surfaces.
The result does not replicate the existing stone, but enters into dialogue with it through tactile and chromatic affinity, as if the landscape had been domesticated into architecture. This stony skin does not seek literal mimicry, but rather an interpretation of place: a translation of the landscape that retains its essence and memory.
The green roof extends the surrounding vegetation, enhancing the building’s energy efficiency while reinforcing its partial invisibility.
Inside, the logic of integration continues. The kitchen, carved from a single block of local Binissalem limestone, embodies both solidity and tactility. Custom carpentry, subdued finishes, and a palette of natural materials generate a coherent language in which the landscape enters the house and the house merges with the landscape.
A circular skylight in the entrance hall introduces zenithal light and reinforces the project’s connection to the elements. The elongated pool, suspended over the valley, is conceived as a water mirror, prolonging the contemplative experience of the place.
The garden reintroduces native flora — pines, olive trees, wild olives, and Mediterranean shrubs — through a low-maintenance and water-efficient strategy.
The project proposes coexistence: an architecture that, far from monumentalising nature, inhabits it with care. This house is not an intervention upon the landscape, but a conversation with it.
