Can Bordoy is a small hotel with a magnificent garden, located in the historic center of Palma de Mallorca. It is a complete renovation of a 2,500 m2 abandoned building that had been heavily intervened throughout more than 500 year.
The project carefully preserves the romantic and decadent atmosphere found in the building and is deliberately contrasted with interventions and elements from different epochs. The house has had many interventions, sometimes aggressive and often breaking the cultural and historical conventions. The project is a respectful intervention, maintaining the traces of the past and avoiding a false recovery of a glorious past that the house has never had.
Inspired by the traditional Japanese technique of Kintsugi - the art of repairing broken antique porcelain with a precious material, such as gold dust, and thus obtaining a repaired piece that does not hide the fracture and whose result may have even more value than the ceramic before breaking- the project doesn´t pretend to hide the eclecticism of the existing building, but instead celebrate the different layers of history and clearly highlight the new interventions that have been necessary for its new use.
A series of architectural strategies were designed and developed throughout the building as a collection of distinctive contemporary interventions in dialogue with the existing building. Large velvet curtains disguise the new bathrooms creating a scenography where the bathroom happens to be the new set; instead of hiding this new element. A green corridor of vegetation invades the dining rooms connecting the garden with the courtyard and the street. In the main staircase, the skylight is flooded with water becoming a small pool with a transparent bottom that creates a play of light flooding the staircase with caustic reflections. Also the furniture is a very important part of the project.
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