#2: How a Hangover Led to Our First Mallorca Rental
Magic Habitat is a Substack documenting our gloriously overthought and occasionally unhinged journey to find a house to buy in Spain. A compendium of all the bizarre places we have viewed across the country in our pursuit of Something Different™️. Written by me, a Creative Strategist who naively thought that it wouldn’t be this complicated.
July 2023
London
A few months earlier, we were in London visiting my best friend. It was Sunday morning, we were nursing hangovers and I was mindlessly scrolling Idealista, the Spanish version of Zillow (US) or Rightmove (UK) and my personal real estate deity.
We didn’t have long before the big move to find somewhere to live and then suddenly like a divine intervention from the Idealista gods - a new listing appeared: a modest beach house in the southeast of Mallorca, an area we’d visited only once. And yes, I’m fully aware of the irony in calling a beach house modest if you’re used to cramped city living. But when Idealista speaks, who am I to argue?
Eight weeks later, we were on a flight via Paris with a cat, a lost suitcase, and a lease.
Autumn 2023
Mallorca
Chairs, Chairs Everywhere
The house was, let’s say, compact. One actual bedroom, two single rooms better suited for storage one of which became my office, a kitchen that made NYC galley kitchens look palatial, and a two-seater sofa seemingly designed as a test of endurance.
It wasn’t until we started viewing other houses that I realized Mallorquins have an almost philosophical relationship with seating. Chairs—often stiff, upright, and aggressively uninviting—were everywhere. Lining hallways, stacked in corners, filling rooms like a surreal furniture cult. A surplus of seats, but never anywhere you’d actually want to sit.
It was furnished simply (read sparsely) like most places on the island, with the kind of reverent devotion to IKEA that seems woven into the island’s DNA. I soon discovered why when I ventured into a supposedly “mid-range” furniture store, only to be slapped with a price tag so astronomical for a single bookcase, I found myself double-checking it wasn’t hand-carved by mythical Mallorcan elves.
When Paradise Becomes a Hashtag
But the location? ICONIC. A five-minute walk down a sandy path led to a tiny chiringuito and, just beyond that, Cala Llombards—one of Mallorca’s most photographed coves. Once upon a time, this stretch of coastline belonged to locals. Now, it belonged to Instagram. Over the months that we lived there, it became clear that the world’s most beautiful places have now become their own superstar marketing departments, transforming every photo taken into #nofilter gold.
From around 5 p.m, when the sun eased off, most of the people who snapped their three identical shots had left and the cove was returned to those who weren’t there to document it. It was a magical place to spend our first three months.
But back to the reality of buying a house. During that time (and well before) we were searching listings almost daily to find Something Different. We wanted Something Different—anything that didn’t look like it was ripped straight from a “Balearic villa with pool” Pinterest board.
Instead, we explored palatial ruins with enough structural drama to obliterate anyone’s budget. We fell in love with photographer’s place complete with a beautiful studio that was close to perfection. We even stumbled upon an abandoned cinema, still bearing relics from a questionable past—1930s fascist iconography included—as well as hundreds of dead pigeons and a colony of bats.
