This vacation house, Neuendorf House, was built by a young unknown architect from England in 1987 : John Pawson. He built it for a German art dealer in an almond grove on the island of Mallorca, with views of sea and mountains. Pawson is known for his stark minimalism, and this house employs this trademark simplicity – with a vivid twist.
The composition of the atrium is emphatically vertical, the exaggerated height of the walls dramatised by the narrowness of the slot opening. As the design brings together certain conventions of interior and exterior spaces, so it plays with the opposition of raw nature and the formality of architecture, pigments from the soil being used to tint the render.