In Majorca, a One-Room Home With Sheep for Neighbors

Long before artists started arriving some two hundred years ago in the sunny hillside villages of Majorca, there were olive trees — nearly infinite quantities, which some oil producers date to the 15th century. The tangled groves still weave throughout the Tramuntana mountain range that hugs the Balearic island’s northwest coast, as essential to the scenery as the dusty cliffs that divebomb into the sea. In the middle is Sóller, a lazy coastal town, in a valley inhabited since 4,000 B.C., from which you can drive inland and lose yourself in the solitude of this singular landscape.

The exterior of the stone dwelling, which the homeowners think is between two and three centuries old.Credit…Salva Lopez

At least, that’s what the designers Tyson Strang and Tatiana Baibabaeva wanted to do when they moved to Sencelles, Majorca, in 2020. The pair, who met in Kyrgyzstan two decades ago, had previously lived for 15 years in New York City, where in 2017 they founded the ceramics line Terra Coll Home. Before turning to pottery, Baibabaeva, 38, had worked in fashion and Strang, 45, had been a teacher; when they relocated to Spain, they fully merged their creative, personal and professional lives, raising two children together, developing a rustic-minded interiors business and even sharing an email address, from which they explain, “For us, ‘rustic design’ means unifying the interior of a space with its landscape by using the raw materials from the surrounding land as the primary construction and design elements.”