OHLAB: EMPATHIC ARCHITECTURE
“We are very interested in how architecture can register the passage of time. Creating with materials, light or spaces so that it's never exactly the same; it has different seasons.”
Though it’s accurate to call OHLAB a sustainable architecture practice, it risks overlooking the richness of their creative world. Their approach is deeply empathic, responding to and working with existing conditions — history, culture, local materials and craft, climate and landscape — while expressing luminous imagination. Their projects feel as inventive and inspiring as they do grounded and honest.
De La Espada recently joined OHLAB’s world through our retailer Bornhold, who shares a creative space with them in Palma de Mallorca and collaborates on select projects. On the occasion of our launch at Bornhold Palma, our co-founder Luis De Oliveira participated in an intimate conversation with OHLAB founders Jaime Oliver and Paloma Hernaiz, moderated by Luiz Felipe Maia of Maia Properties. The conversation revealed an alignment of design values and a view into the sensitivity with which OHLAB approaches their work. In the edited excerpts below, they discuss the beauty in ageing materials, the design process as opera, and how island-living elicits a sense of responsibility.
OHLAB’s view of design is both local and international, influenced by the founders’ diverse experiences. Both were educated at prestigious universities in their home country of Spain and abroad at Columbia in New York and, prior to establishing OHLAB, they worked with some of architecture’s most illustrious names in Europe, the United States and China, including OMA / Rem Koolhaas in Shanghai and Beijing. Since establishing OHLAB, they have garnered global acclaim for their meticulous attention to craftsmanship, material honesty, and sustainability across architecture and interiors.
ARCHITECTURE AS OPERA
LUIZ FELIPE MAIA, MAIA PROPERTIES: Where is the current focus of your work and how does that influence how you think about design?
LUIS DE OLIVEIRA, DE LA ESPADA: For 30-40 years, we haven't seen a lot of total design; the idea of designing a space, public or private, where you really go down to the last detail. But I see more and more interest in that. And some of the things that we've been doing as a workshop has been connected to clients who really want to do total design; something that is specific to the project. That's a really interesting change for us with our 30 years of experience.
Total design, though, is the project that you just finished, [Terreno Barrio hotel] — there's a lot of details.
JAIME OLIVER, OHLAB: In most of our projects, we try to design everything, from the architecture to the furniture, the bar, even the music. In that sense, it feels almost like an opera.
But the more we work with this idea of ‘total design’, the more we realise how essential collaboration is. Because as much as you want to get into every single detail, which we try to do, you realise that it's difficult unless you have a really good network and know how to delegate properly. Even if designing is our favourite part of the work, without the right skills in management and collaboration, the vision can easily fall apart.
We often compare it to filmmaking: no matter how good the director or the actors are, if you do not choose the right team and create the conditions for everyone to do their best work, it is very difficult to achieve a complete result.
PALOMA HERNAIZ, OHLAB: It’s amazing what we did on the [Terreno Barrio] hotel. We did all the work with local people — all the furniture, everything is supplied by local artisans. And it was a challenge because it was dealing with 20, 30 different people that are not coming from the industry of the time, budget, hurry-up. They’re really in the roots of creating things for a small scale. So it was very difficult but the work they did is amazing because everything that you can see in the hotel is done with a lot of care with local materials. And the result is pretty impressive.
OHLAB always considers the locale when working on projects, with deference for the surrounding environment, its resources and community.
In Terreno Barrio, this manifests as a hotel that embraces its neighbourhood with inviting social spaces across coworking, hospitality, and the arts, and acts as a showcase for local artisanal craft. Merging history and modernity, it comprises a thoughtfully restored building from 1935 alongside a new structure designed under Passive House criteria and awarded LEED Platinum certification.
OHLAB's Casa Tramuntana residence in the mountains of Palma expresses regard for nature by responding to its natural contours; essentially embedded in the landscape through stepped levels, the residence creates minimal visual disruption in the environment while preserving existing plant life and land formations. Oriented away from the city and the sea, Casa Tramuntana offers sweeping views of the mountain, balancing privacy with open vistas.
RESTORATION WITH SOUL
OHLAB's masterful work in restoration balances historical features with modern interventions:
JAIME, OHLAB: Can Bordoy [hotel] is a project that talks about this. The challenge was: how can we restore this to be a super high-class stay but keep the soul without being folkloric? How can you do it in an authentic way? That's when we developed this approach of layers. So we keep the old one but we add a new one so you maintain both. So you just restore exactly what needs to be perfect and then leave some things completely as they were, and keep this patina of different areas.
Can Santacilia is another project to employ this approach. The residential project in Palma’s old town involved renovating two 17th century buildings. OHLAB chose to honour the original history of the buildings and their renovations over time, preserving the valuable elements in each layer while modernising to address the demands of 21st century living. Original features including wooden mouldings, ceilings and flooring; ceramic; stone; and wrought ironwork, are placed in contrast with mirrored panels, aged bronze, and local stone and textiles. The contrast of the old and new is harmonious yet striking, and gives equal importance to every moment in time.
MATERIALS AS MARKERS OF TIME
The value of time is also communicated through the use of noble, local materials. This ensures longevity, creates emotional appeal, and connects a building to its locale.
LUIZ, MAIA PROPERTIES: Material plays a very strong role in both of your work. How do you think people connect to material today?
LUIS, DE LA ESPADA: When it comes to materials, I'm always surprised how ignorant people are. We are divorced from materials in our day-to-day life. Things are made, they’re done, they are brought to us. So even amongst people in a profession where they have more contact with materials, there can be less knowledge than you would expect.
But there's also emotion in materials. I think it sort of replaces the lack of technical knowledge. And some materials connect with people very well; this deep thing, almost ancestral.
PALOMA, OHLAB: I think there's a mix of things. Firstly, the sensibility; people prefer materials that are more natural rather than more artificial. They feel happier with a piece of wood than a piece of composite. There is a thought that natural materials are more sustainable and represent different values that are more from this generation. And also the way they age because usually artificial materials age so badly.
JAIME, OHLAB: The two things Paloma mentioned are very important to us. The need to touch materials that feel natural, and the feeling that a material is somehow vulnerable or alive. And also ageing is crucial. We love using untreated materials that age, that may stain or be marked over time. For us, that is part of their virtue. So ageing should be great, no? You don’t want to have materials that never change because it’s completely artificial; they don’t register the passage of time.
We are very interested in how architecture can register the passage of time. Creating with materials, light or spaces so that it's never exactly the same; it has different seasons. It changes with the hours of the day, the seasons of the year, and the way light enters over time. Those things are very important to us.
Time is a central theme of Casa Oculo, a residential project that takes its name from a solar oculus piercing the roof of the main terrace. Its oblique funnel shape directs the sun across the house interior, shifting from room to room according to the season and the time of day. In summer, it also serves a practical purpose of providing natural light while protecting from direct sun. Welcoming change in every moment, the oculus poetically embraces the passage of time and the beauty in the here and now.
Sometimes OHLAB’s inventive approach leads them to unexpected solutions, both in terms of what can be done and by whom. In a current retail project for Mallorcan brand Sonmo, they went in search of an artisan to carry out a very specific vision, and found the answer in an entirely different discipline:
JAIME, OHLAB: We love to work with different materials in a very specialised way. We also enjoy the naivete of exploring with different materials. Sometimes when you master the material it is more difficult to innovate; you’re too close to it. So sometimes you get someone that is looking at it from a completely different point of view.
We’re doing this store for Sonmo which is a brand that uses all the products from their very big and beautiful estate in the mountains of Mallorca. They have a lot of sheep, so they use the wool. And we’re designing a store that is covered with small thin threads of wool, 4 metres tall, separated 1 centimetre one from another, and they cover the walls, the ceiling, and everything. It’s kind of like a box of thread.
To realise their design, OHLAB approached experts in textile with over a century of craft wisdom, but couldn’t find someone who could do what they asked. Then, Jaime had another idea:
JAIME, OHLAB: I brought in a fisherman that knows a lot about nets. So he's using the wool, treating it as nets for fishing and making them with scaffolding one by one. It's beautiful to talk to different people and put them together and really listen to the expertise.
I thought, ‘They cannot do it, but I know a fisherman who understands nets almost like a magician, so let’s bring him into the mountains.’ The whole process has been beautiful, and we think it will become a very exciting space. For us, it is an example of listening carefully to materials, to people and to unexpected forms of knowledge.
THE INFLUENCE OF ISLAND LIVING
Listening is one of the core tenets of OHLAB’s practice; listening to the earth, to the community, to the climate, to history. Their architecture is a conversation from the heart. Living in Mallorca, they respond to the needs of the island.
JAIME, OHLAB: Over the last few years, we have become increasingly aware of how much living on an island influences our work. It makes you more conscious of the finiteness of land, materials and resources. Because when you think about, ‘OK I want to use the resources from here’ it’s already limited.
You inevitably think more about where things come from and what impact they will have on the island. So even though, yes, we work outside and now we're working in Brazil, or Canary Islands, or Ibiza, the fact our development playground is here makes us think differently about materials.
LUIS, DE LA ESPADA: That’s super interesting. I never thought about it that way. But I always say that one of the problems we have in our current world is how we externalise everything: ‘It’s not my problem; that will happen somewhere else’. And often that's because you can just push it away, right? But if the island is a boundary, you can't push it away.
JAIME, OHLAB: Exactly. When we are in Madrid or with our friends I can see sometimes how it is not a preoccupation. In larger cities, there can sometimes be a sense that growth is almost endless. Here, when you build a house, you are always aware that this means one piece of land has been transformed. You have this added responsibility because there's no more land than that, so how you are going to do it affects the rest of the island. And it kind of creates a responsibility.
And I think it’s natural. We don’t think about it as a radical approach. It just kind of comes naturally. And I think it makes it a little bit bigger when you live on a small island. But ultimately, the world is also a small island, in a way. So it’s interesting to think about it like that.
While OHLAB's approach to architecture and interiors encompasses a wide range of considerations, there is a single value at its core:
LUIZ, MAIA PROPERTIES: Just to close, a simple question: What makes a space feel ‘right’?
JAIME, OHLAB: For us, in the end, it comes down to emotion.
PALOMA, OHLAB: It’s about the smells, the touch, the textures, not only about what you see. It’s about what you feel in all senses.
JAIME, OHLAB: And emotion, in the end, is not only something outside us. It is something that happens within us. Your mind creates it, so it means exploring the inside of each of us. Sometimes you try to understand the inside of someone else or a group of people or society but it starts with you.
Photography top to bottom, left to right: images 1 and 9, Casa Oculo; images 2, 6-8, and 10, Casa Lladoners; image 3, designer portrait; images 4-5, Can Santacilia.
Photo credit: images 1-2 and 6-11 by Jose Hevia. Images 3-5 courtesy of OHLAB architects.
