How Studio Roses made a hotel feel like part of its neighbourhood

Terreno Barrio Hotel is hospitality group Piñero’s first urban hotel in Palma, Spain. Mallorca-based branding and graphic design studio Studio Roses was brought in early on to develop the hospitality concept itself through the strategy, naming and identity, and on to the tone of voice, brand architecture and signage. The brief asked what could be made from the character of El Terreno, the neighbourhood the site sits in. Studio Roses began with a question rather than a proposal: whether another hotel was needed at all. What it arrived at was a barrio hotel. Barrio is the Spanish for neighbourhood. The model runs in both directions – the hotel was to become part of the neighbourhood rather than simply occupy a building in it, and the neighbourhood was to carry on through the hotel’s site. El Terreno has also been Piñero’s own neighbourhood for more than 40 years, being where its offices are based. “We asked Studio Roses to explore what we could create from the identity and particular character of El Terreno,” the group’s Owner Lidia Piñero tells us. “We knew we didn’t want to create simply another hotel in Palma, but something genuinely connected to a neighbourhood with an extraordinary history and personality.” The starting point had come from creative consultant José Taltavull, who was living in the neighbourhood at the time. “Terreno started with an initial idea I had been discussing with the owners: the idea of a hotel built around a broader notion of circularity – not simply environmental, but social, cultural and economic,” he explains. “The idea was for the hotel to become part of the neighbourhood, with its life, culture and economy becoming part of the project, too. From there, Studio Roses and I began a collaborative process to develop and articulate that initial thinking into a conceptual framework for the project. The barrio concept emerged from that evolution.” That thinking also became the brief for the architecture. Mallorca-based architects OHLAB, led by Paloma Hernaiz and Jaime Oliver, split the hotel into two volumes, one a protected historic building and the other new construction, and cut a public passage between them through what had been its private ground.