Jordi Herrero Turns Can Oliver, a Medieval Palace in Palma, into a Hotel That Lets Its Walls Tell the Story

Can Oliver is a palace on Calle Caputxines in the old town of Palma de Mallorca. Its origins are traced to the 12th century, and its fabric carries Arabic, Gothic and later layers: an Arabic coffered ceiling, Gothic paintings, a Majorcan staircase and a 1950s intervention. Earlier attempts to convert it into a hotel failed to win approval from the city council. Jordi Herrero Arquitecto, with Eduardo García Acuña, has now turned it into Hotel Nobis Palma, a 5-star boutique hotel of 2,253 m² completed in 2023. Wingårdhs designed the interiors, with Helena Toresson leading.

What interests us is how the team set its priorities. Most heritage hotels fit a room count into a protected shell and then decorate the leftovers. Here a detailed architectural survey, with archaeologist Rafael Turatti, came first. The building's identity was meant to shape the hotel. Arched doorways, bricked-in windows and stacked façades stay visible. New work arrives mostly as black steel boxes set into restored stone and brick. The result is a building that reads as an archive you can sleep in, and it mostly avoids the trap of nostalgia.

A Quiet Threshold on Calle Caputxines

From the street, the hotel barely announces itself. A window cut into rough limestone frames the lobby, its staircase and potted palms. Next to a blocked arch, a tall, narrow glazed slot glows at dusk. The new openings are thin and precise. The old ones, including the arch filled in long ago, are left as they were found.

That restraint is a planning argument as much as an aesthetic one. In an old town where previous proposals were turned down, the façade had to stay a façade, not a sign. The limestone steps up to the recessed doorway let you feel the building's scale before you see any hotel.

The Courtyard as the Building's Core

The courtyard is where the palace explains itself. Pointed stone arches, a round bronze basin and potted palms sit on worn paving. The arched entrance keeps a line of sight back to the street. Looking up, the walls rise to a square of sky, with strung lights over the arcade.

The objects added here are few and low. A shallow bowl of petals and the bronze basin stay at floor level, so the vertical stone keeps all its weight. It is a confident choice: the courtyard is left as a room of masonry and light, not filled with furniture.

Loggia, Stair and the Grain of the Walls

A triple-arched loggia and a stone staircase anchor one side of the courtyard. Inside, a stair climbs past a worn wall with a slim black metal balustrade. It is drawn so thin that the wall stays the main event. This is the material contrast at its clearest: one line of dark steel against centuries of uneven stone.

Seen through a moulded arch and a slender column, the rough plastered courtyard wall shows its small recessed windows without correction. Nobody tidied up the irregular openings. That honesty is what the survey made possible: once you know what every scar means, you can decide to keep it.

Lemon Trees, a Plunge Pool and a Long Table

Under a pair of arches on a slim stone column, a plunge pool sits beside a dark steel panel wall and a lemon tree in sunlight. It may be the best single image of the project's logic. The column is old, the steel is new, the water is a luxury, and none of them pretends to be the others.

Elsewhere, red mesh chairs on a pebble floor and red stools at a long communal table add a dose of colour. The communal table faces a stainless steel kitchen counter along a rough stone wall, under a dark timber ceiling. The professional kitchen is placed in full view, with no attempt to dress it up as rustic.

Bar and Restaurant Between Two Walls

The bar is a stone counter with three black stools under vaulted arches, lit by a single linear pendant. The restaurant repeats that move at a larger scale, with linear fixtures hung beneath stone vaults and timber beams. The lights run in straight lines that refuse to follow the curve of the arches, so the vaults read clearly as old and the lighting as new.

The restaurant also holds the project's most telling decision. Both the 1950s wall and the original wall behind it were kept. Many restorers would treat the mid-century layer as noise to strip away. Keeping it says the building's history did not stop at some chosen golden age, and that 70 years of change count as part of the record too.

Rooms Without New Walls

In the protected guest-room volumes, no new partition walls were added. That is a real constraint for a hotel, where privacy usually means subdivision. The rooms work instead with furniture and fabric: a curved wooden desk, an oak chair, a timber headboard and tall sheer curtains around a wooden French window.

The Wingårdhs palette of wood, wool and leather stays soft and low-contrast against weathered plaster and exposed beams. Nothing competes with the walls, which seem to be the real luxury on offer here.

Bathrooms as Glass and Linen

The bathrooms show how the no-partition rule plays out in practice. One is a glass enclosure set beside a lime-plastered stone wall under dark timber beams, with a mirror simply leaning against the wall. Another uses floor-to-ceiling grey linen curtains around a freestanding tub and a round basin, lit by a timber-framed window.

Glass and curtains are removable by nature. They make the bathroom a piece of furniture inside a historic room instead of a new room carved out of it. It is a reversible approach, which is exactly what a protected interior should demand.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings reveal how irregular the palace really is. The site plan shows a wedge of thick, fragmented walls between two streets. The ground floor fits dining, lounges and small bedrooms around a central courtyard. Upper floors ring guest rooms along the curved north edge and leave large double-height voids and column grids to the south.

The second floor plan is worth a close look. Several rooms are drawn unfurnished, heavy-walled spaces left as they are rather than forced into the program. The sections run from a vaulted basement through arcaded ground-floor rooms and a tall central hall up to pitched roofs. A small cluster of rooms with terraces and a rooftop pool sits among those roofs, the only place where the hotel really adds a new layer of use.

Why This Project Matters

Hotel Nobis Palma shows that a heritage conversion can work as a reading of a building, with the hotel fitted to what the reading finds. Starting with a survey, keeping the 1950s wall next to the medieval one, and leaving protected rooms undivided are not decorative choices. They decide what the hotel is allowed to be. The black steel insertions are the visible sign of that, but the real work is in what the team chose not to do.

For architects facing old town sites where approvals have failed before, the lesson is practical. Reversible, clearly contemporary additions set against a carefully recorded fabric can unlock a project that a more seamless approach would not. Can Oliver now pays for its own upkeep as a hotel, and its layers have stayed readable rather than being smoothed over.

Hotel Nobis Palma by Jordi Herrero Arquitecto (Jordi Herrero Campo, with Eduardo García Acuña), interiors by Wingårdhs. Palma, Spain. 2,253 m². Completed 2023. Photography by José Hevia.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.