Project: Forbes House
Architects: Miel Arquitectos
Builder: Xarxa Homes
Location: Costa d’en Blanes, Spain
Area 654.0 m2
Project Year 2018
Photography: José Hevia
Forbes House is a single family-home that looks boldly on a hillside of Costa d’en Blanes with views over the entire Bay of Palma. In the way in which the hanging gardens of Babylon built a domesticated natural environment, the Forbes House 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 Forbes 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.
The immersion to the lower floor is carried out by a slab with a spiral dug and a group of lenticchias lamps as a bank of jellyfish.
This last floor of the Forbes house is the gift of the owners to their family and friends, 3 en-suite bedrooms with a front terrace that will allow them to abstract from their reality while they can be your guests. 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.
