A residence acquires its character long before a buyer walks into it, and the concept is where that character gets decided. A concept drawn as an answer to the architecture, the market position and the buyer will still read as considered a decade after handover. One assembled out of whatever is current will look like a dozen competitors by the time the building completes. That difference is the whole of what follows.
A design concept is the complete interior scheme for a development: the materials, the finishes, the furniture, the detailing and the images that sell it, all held together by a single idea. Seen from outside it can look like a collection of samples – references, colours, an architectural detail or two. The assembly underneath is harder than that. Every decision in a concept has to carry three things at once: the visual identity of the property, its position in the market, and the person who will eventually buy it.
A development approved this year reaches its buyer two or three years later, and that buyer may then live in the residence for another decade. Our design stage runs two to six months, and the interior it settles is then lived with for years. I am therefore not drawing for the moment the concept is signed off, and the real question is how the finished rooms will read to someone standing in them years after the idea that produced them stopped being new. Professional experience on its own does not answer that. What answers it is visual judgement built up over years – architecture, furniture, materials, art, hospitality, the way design culture moves from one country to the next – together with the ability to recognise which of the current ideas will be gone in three seasons.
When a concept is assembled from familiar references, prevailing trends and solutions already proven somewhere else, the result can be entirely polished and still be impossible to tell apart from a dozen other projects on the same market. The materials are correct. The palette is sophisticated. The furniture is recognisable, drawn from the same two or three catalogues everyone else is drawing from, and nothing in the room states a point of view. A buyer who sees three developments in Palma in one afternoon comes away with nothing to hold on to.
Distinctive projects begin from a harder question: what should make this particular property memorable? The answer usually comes out of the building itself – its architecture, the landscape around it, the street, the profile of the person who will live there, sometimes one detail developed far enough to become the project’s own visual language. My work is to connect those into a single narrative a room can be built from, instead of reproducing an aesthetic that has already succeeded elsewhere.
At XO Parq in Palma the answer took the shape of three design lines. A design line is one complete interior scheme for a development – the materials, the finishes, the furniture and the renders that sell it – and the 65 residences there are offered in three of them. Raw works in chrome, graphite and dark leather, the hardest-edged of the three. Adagio works in bouclé, marble and lacquer with blush and brass, the softest. Artà works in ash, tan leather and terracotta, the warmest. The architecture does not change between the three, and neither does the budget or the construction. What changes is which buyer the residence is talking to.
The same approach produced two lines at XO Jonquet, on the seafront above the old fishermen’s quarter: El Monte in walnut and dark stone against pale travertine, and La Brisa reading the identical plan the other way, in travertine, light stone and oak.
What the developer gets from it: buyers choose their line in the sales office. Long before handover the developer knows which scheme is being taken and how often – which tells him what to order, and which line to give the residences still unsold.
Following a trend too literally dates a project before it ever reaches the market. Ignoring trends altogether leaves it disconnected from what a buyer expects to see on the day the building completes. The projects that hold up sit between those two positions: current enough to be recognised as of their moment, restrained and particular enough to go on working once that moment has passed. The judgement is in telling a direction apart from a season.
A residence drawn for an international buyer in Mallorca asks for a different sensibility from an apartment in a Central European city or a holiday property bought mainly as an investment. Our most recent projects have been in Spain, Switzerland, Italy and Poland, and no two of them wanted the same interior. Lifestyle, geography, price position and buyer expectation all move a concept, often in ways that never show up on a moodboard. Range is what makes that answerable: as Ambassador of Archiproducts we specify from over 3.500 brands, and the piece that is right for a penthouse over the park at XO Parq is rarely the piece that is right for the same square metres in a city centre.
Concept development is the stage where architecture, market position and future lifestyle get translated into one design language, and everything after it inherits that translation. The choice of materials, the furniture, the lighting, the level of detailing, the drawings a contractor builds from and finally the way the property is presented and perceived – each of those becomes a precise question once the concept is settled, and a series of guesses while it is not. Treated as a decorative stage bolted on at the end, it costs a project the one thing that was going to distinguish it.
A concept that works does more than answer the question “What should this interior look like today?” It answers two harder ones: “What will make this project recognisable among the others on the market?” and “Will it still be wanted ten years from now?”
More than a decade of residential work, from the studio in Palma de Mallorca.
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