Neuendorf House

Santanyí occupies the quiet southeastern corner of Mallorca, an agricultural district of almond and carob groves on flat land that runs toward the coves of Cala Llombards and Cala Santanyí. The town gave its name to the honey-coloured sandstone quarried here for centuries and used across the island, from village houses to Palma's cathedral. Neuendorf House stands outside the town in the middle of an almond grove, announced by nothing except a long straight path that arrives at a tall, narrow vertical slit cut into a monolithic wall the colour of the local earth. There is no door visible from the approach. The wall gives nothing away.

The house was completed in 1989 to a commission from the German art dealer Hans Neuendorf, designed by John Pawson and Claudio Silvestrin in the brief period they practised together, and it has since entered the canon as one of the founding built statements of architectural minimalism. The architectural language is reduced to a handful of moves: terracotta-pigmented rendered walls that take their colour from the surrounding soil, floors and benches cut from Santanyí sandstone, an enclosed entrance courtyard open to the sky, and a long, narrow lap pool that projects from the house into the grove like a drawn line. Nothing decorative survives the editing. The house remains in the Neuendorf family, who have restored and equipped it carefully for guests, and who also run an artist residency and an architecture visiting school on site, keeping the building in active cultural use rather than preserving it as a museum piece. It sleeps eleven across five bedrooms, with two salt-water pools, a clay tennis court, and a rooftop terrace facing the sea.