Born 10 is a minimalist residential renovation located in Mallorca, Spain, designed by NØRA Studio. Binissalem sits at the foothills of the Serra de Tramuntana, a UNESCO-protected mountain range whose limestone geology has shaped the island’s building traditions for centuries. The village is equally defined by its winemaking culture – a heritage that NØRA studio absorbed as a structuring metaphor for their renovation of an 18th-19th century Mallorcan casal. The process of winemaking, from harvest through fermentation to the emergence of something refined from raw material, became the conceptual lens through which the studio approached the layered complexity of the existing house and its relationship to village life.

The renovation organizes the 560-square-meter property across three distinct levels, each calibrated to a different register of domestic life. The ground floor operates as the house’s most socially porous zone, where living, dining, kitchen, and gallery spaces flow together across continuous flooring that extends the same material logic to the exterior. This dissolution of threshold – interior and exterior sharing the same surface plane – invites a sustained exchange between household and village. The strategy recalls the courtyard typologies common to Mediterranean vernacular architecture, where domestic life was never entirely private, always in dialogue with the street and community beyond.

The middle level is reached by a vaulted staircase classified as local heritage, its preservation a condition of the project. NØRA introduced a new skylight above this circulation space, transforming a transitional zone into a moment of pause and convergence. Here the material palette grows more considered: encaustic tiles, stone, and wood meet in junctions whose detailing draws attention to the seams where old and new coexist. The neutral tones and generous proportions of the original structure guide the bedroom design, allowing light to function as a primary spatial element rather than an afterthought.

The top floor is the most reduced of the three worlds. Original wooden roof beams are left exposed as the dominant architectural fact, and the program is stripped to a reading area and primary suite. The restraint is deliberate – this is a floor where nothing competes with the structure itself. The approach carries echoes of the wabi-sabi sensibility that privileges the found and the aged over the new and the polished, though the execution remains distinctly Mediterranean in its handling of light and mass.