A 1935 Palma apartment block and a cork-clad newcomer now form one hotel
A renovated apartment block from 1935 and a new seven-storey building now make up a single hotel in Palma, on the Spanish island of Mallorca. The design, reported by Dezeen on 27 October 2026, was overseen by OHLAB, an architecture and interior design studio based in Mallorca.
The hotel is called Terreno Barrio Hotel. It sits in El Terreno, a neighbourhood in the west of Palma, and it has 41 rooms. OHLAB describes it as an urban hotel, and the hotel calls itself a boutique hotel.
The older part is a five-storey apartment block first designed by the architect Francesc Casas. OHLAB renovated it and calls it "the stage." It now holds the reception, a restaurant and bar, a club and a roof bar.
The new building is what OHLAB calls "the bazaar." It wraps a public plaza, an open square the building surrounds, and houses a cafe, coworking areas, a bookshop and gallery, pop-up shops, a gym, a spa and a cinema.
The new building is made from cross-laminated timber, which is wood panels built up in layers, and it is clad partly in cork. Cork covers the north-facing wall that looks onto the courtyard. Timber louvres, which are slatted screens, shade the windows on the other outside walls from direct sun. Monocle describes a facade of vertical timber louvres that open and close automatically, letting sunlight in during the winter.
Inside the bedrooms, the walls are split with colour. OHLAB uses colour-blocking, a method of painting separate fields of colour, to create a horizontal line between the top and bottom of each room. The bedroom floors and furniture share a matching terrazzo, a speckled surface of stone chips set in cement. The terrazzo was produced by Huguet using waste from the demolition of the old building.
The Financial Times reported on 7 October 2026 that the hotel was built to Passivhaus principles. Passivhaus is an energy standard for buildings that need very little heating or cooling.
The hotel is also on the shortlist for the World Architecture Festival 2026, according to ArchDaily, which published the list on 14 July 2026. A shortlist is a group of finalists, not a winner.
Terreno Barrio Hotel's own website says that its historic building and its modern building each have their own character, and that this shows in every room. The project's central idea is simple: an old block and a new one, joined by a shared public square, with the ground-floor spaces open to people beyond the hotel's guests.
