“I don’t think it’s possible to get tired of this point of view,” says Katharina Herold, curator, art dealer, designer and gallery owner. Sitting at a desk with harlequin motifs on the first floor of the Majorcan house that she is gradually transforming into a house, residential gallery and artist residency space, she looks at the baroque facade of the church of Sant Miquel of the 16th century. . From there, it has a breathtaking view of the comings and goings of the Place des Baléares below.
Located in the heart of the southeastern town of Felanitx, Herold’s grandiose 18th-century mansion, Ca’n Llevadora, is an architectural testament to the region’s past wealth. Once a center of ceramics and winemaking, and today increasingly a refuge for artists, it remains a place of saints and ceremonies. “Felanitx holds its very close traditions. There’s a party outside my window almost every week,” says Herold. “Last weekend was the celebration of the pepper harvest.” Herold has embraced these religious and rural rituals since she acquired the house three years ago – and has freely abandoned its exterior for a rotating display of banners and flags to commemorate the endless succession of holy days.
The house was originally built for a prominent landowning family, and today the interiors are an equally festive feast of art, antiques and decorative trinkets – assembled and arranged by Herold. As a gallery, the “Heroldian Townhouse” is about as far from a white-walled box as you can get. For Herold, its completion marks the fulfillment of a long-held dream: to live among the artworks and objects she has sold and collected since she purchased her first painting at auction at age 15. years. The cavernous interior, with its beamed ceilings and generous window shapes, has become a Chamber of Wonders – overflowing with trinkets and vignettes.
Herold’s fascination with decorative objects began as a child, when she spent hours exploring the cabinet of curiosities of her father, gallery owner Rainer Herold, filled with Egyptian glassware, Roman fragments and marble busts ( Herold still works as an art dealer and occasional curator of the family business Galerie Herold, specializing in North German art). “His first gallery was run from his bedroom,” says Herold, whose mother grew up on the northwest coast of Scotland, where they spent summers. She created an art consultancy firm Héroldian artistic concepts in 2018, following his studies and his first professional experiences, helping clients to reconstitute existing collections or create new ones. Herold also designs unique works, in situ, sometimes in conjunction with interior designers, brought to life by his circle of artists.
It was more by chance than design that Herold landed in the Balearic Islands. Traveling from her apartment in Hamburg during the pandemic, she accompanied a photographer friend on a mission to capture the island’s artisans, and never left. “I kept extending my stay,” says Herold, who had intended to settle in London, but saw in Mallorca an opportunity to create a national gallery and artist’s studio. She stopped at Felanitx, attracted by its townhouses, many of which were abandoned after a plague struck the region’s vineyards in the 19th century.
From the moment she entered Ca’n Llevadora, with its high atrium and marble staircases, she said: “I immediately saw what it could look like. My father said that paintings choose people, and that’s how I feel about this house: it chose me.
“The house doesn’t really make sense,” Herold says. “It’s a bit weird. That’s why I fell in love with it: it’s beautiful, but really strange. This feeling of eccentricity continues. In the kitchen, she built a stone partition wall and installed a yellow panel Lachanche range with a gallery display of vibrant paintings around the large kitchen table, which overlooks the vintage red VW that inhabits one corner of the room. She used to drive the car, but now uses it primarily as an extra seat. “The main thing is not to get too obsessed with whether or not you’re making the right decision,” Herold says of his fearless decorating style. “You just have to live there and see.”
While each room is filled with his offbeat curations, the top floor is a studio and exhibition space for the artists in residence that Herold invites as part of his consulting work. The simple series of whitewashed rooms with polished concrete floors and a large terrace overlooking the weekly Sunday market is currently inhabited by multidisciplinary artist Vicente Hirmas.
“It’s quite personal because the artist lives with me,” explains Herold about the device. The intention is for everyone to leave their indelible mark on the house. This is certainly the case for Hirmas, whose pair of carved and enlarged wooden fingers stand proudly in the first-floor living room, and who has spectacularly transformed the wooden shipping crates that once housed Herold’s new cooker in a pair of cone-shaped sculptures as part of the house’s recent exhibition, Where is the well. “The idea is that the house is constantly evolving,” says Herold, who is currently collaborating with Hirmas on the design of a site-specific bookcase for a Hamburg client’s library, which features an intricately carved sun motif that n t is reminiscent of the family crest of the original owners which adorns the atrium arcade below.
Among the auction lots and Mallorcan market finds – including the guest bedroom bed and a sculptural marble sink – are pieces salvaged from the sale of the home of designer Malene Birger, who lives locally. They are in communion with Herold’s own creations, notably the Draped Shelf, a base inspired by the folds of a drapery, suspended in plaster but designed to support the weight of a 30 kg sculpture. For Classic Week at Christie’s, Herold filled an entire wall with sconces, shelves and stands, each supporting an antique vessel – to mesmerizing effect. Customers who come by appointment to visit and shop at Herold’s invariably stay for a drink or even dinner (almost everything, except the paintings his father gave him, is for sale). At the Consell flea market, she moves like a hawk, instinctively drawn to curious and colorful things – from ribboned Union Jack flags to strips of cheap velvet the color of antique pink.
The true beauty of the townhouse is that it effortlessly showcases eclectic tastes without ever feeling cluttered. Even the interior’s rich palette of natural pigment paints was personally developed by Herold, drawing inspiration from the intense tones of Renaissance frescoes. “It’s already weird,” she said. “But there’s always room for more.”
After filling the house with canvases and sculptures by artists such as Florence Hutchings, Vera Edwards and Johannes Geccelli, Herold happily reflects on the rhythms of Felanitx’s life. Next to his bed, in a small corner that reflects the 14th-century starry sky rendered by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel, is a statue of Saint Anthony. The patron saint of animals is celebrated each January with a ceremony in which his statue is moved from the house to the square, followed by a procession in which people bring everything from flocks of sheep to owls in passing through domestic animals, to be blessed. For Herold, it’s just another day in the ever-changing scene unfolding in the square below.
