The Mallorcan townhouse where every room is a gallery

“I don’t think it’s possible to tire of this view,” says the curator, art dealer, designer and gallerist Katharina Herold. Seated at a harlequin-patterned desk on the first floor of the Mallorcan townhouse she has been slowly transforming into a home, live-in gallery and artist’s residency space, she is looking out onto the baroque façade of the 16th-century church of Sant Miquel. From here, she is afforded ringside views of the comings and goings of the Balearic square below.

Situated in the heart of the south-eastern town of Felanitx, Herold’s grandly proportioned 18th-century mansion, Ca’n Llevadora, is an architectural testament to the area’s bygone affluence. Once a thriving mecca for ceramics and winemaking, and now increasingly a refuge for artists, it remains a place of saints and ceremonies. “Felanitx holds its traditions very close. There’s a fiesta outside my window almost every week,” says Herold. “Last weekend was the celebration of the harvest of the bell peppers.” Herold has embraced these religious and rural rituals since she acquired the house three years ago – and has freely relinquished its exterior to a rotating display of bunting and flags to commemorate the endless succession of saints’ days.

The house was originally built for a prominent landowning family and, today, the interiors are a similarly celebratory fiesta of art, antiquities and decorative curios – assembled and arranged by Herold. As a gallery, the “Heroldian Townhouse” is about as far as it’s possible to be from a white-walled box. For Herold, its completion marks the realisation of a long-held dream of dwelling among the artworks and objects that she has dealt in and collected since she bought her first painting at auction aged 15. The cavernous interior, with its beamed ceilings and generous sweep of windows, has become a Wunderkammer – brimming with trinkets and vignettes.

Herold’s fascination with decorative objects began as a child when she would spend hours exploring the cabinet of curiosities belonging to her father, the gallerist Rainer Herold, which were filled with Egyptian glassware, Roman fragments and marble busts (Herold still works as an art dealer and occasional curator for the family firm, Galerie Herold, which specialises in northern German art). “His first gallery was run from his bedroom,” says Herold, whose mother grew up on Scotland’s north-west coast where they would spend the summer. She established art consultancy Heroldian Art Concepts in 2018, following her studies and early work experience, helping clients re-curate existing collections or create new ones. Herold also designs unique, site-specific works, occasionally in liaison with interior designers, brought to life by her circle of artists.

It was by chance rather than design that Herold landed in the Balearics. Travelling from her apartment in Hamburg during the pandemic, she accompanied a photographer friend on an assignment to capture the island’s artisans, and never left. “I kept extending my stay,” says Herold, who had meant to relocate to London, but saw in Mallorca a chance to create a domestic gallery and artist’s studio. She fixed on Felanitx, enamoured by its townhouses, many of which were abandoned after a blight struck the region’s vineyards in the 19th century. 

The moment she stepped inside Ca’n Llevadora, with its lofty atrium and marbled stairs, she says, “I could immediately see how it could look. My father used to say that paintings choose people, and that’s how I feel about this house – it chose me.”

“The house doesn’t really make a lot of sense,” says Herold. “It’s a bit weird. That’s why I fell in love with it – it’s beautiful, but really strange.” That sense of eccentricity very much endures. In the kitchen, she has built a stone dividing wall and installed a yellow Lacanche 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 mostly uses it as extra seating. “The big thing is to not get too obsessed with whether or not you’re making the right decision,” says Herold of her fearless decorating style. “You have to just live in it and see.”

While every room is filled with her offbeat curations, the top floor is a live-in studio and exhibition space for the artists in residence that Herold invites as part of her consultancy work. The simple series of whitewashed rooms with polished concrete floors, and a large terrace overlooking the weekly Sunday market, is currently inhabited by the multidisciplinary artist Vicente Hirmas.

“It’s quite personal because the artist lives with me,” says Herold of the set-up. The intention is that everyone will leave their own indelible mark on the house. That’s certainly true of Hirmas, whose pair of carved, enlarged wooden fingers stand proudly in the first-floor salon, and who has spectacularly transformed the wooden transport crates that once housed Herold’s new cooker into a pair of cone-shaped sculptures as part of the house’s recent exhibition, Where the Well Is. “The idea is that the house constantly evolves,” says Herold, who is currently collaborating with Hirmas on a site-specific bookcase design for a client’s Hamburg library, which features an intricately carved sun motif not dissimilar to the original owners’ family crest that adorns the archway in the atrium downstairs.

Dotted among the auction lots and Mallorcan market finds – including the bed in the guest room and a sculptural marble sink – are pieces picked up from the house sale of designer Malene Birger, who lives locally. They sit in communion with Herold’s own creations – not least the Draped Shelf, a plinth inspired by the folds of drapery,  suspended in plaster but designed to stand the weight of a 30kg sculpture. For classical week at Christie’s, Herold filled an entire wall with swagged sconces, shelves and brackets, each one supporting an ancient vessel – to mesmeric effect. The clients who come by appointment to survey, and shop, Herold’s home, invariably stay for drinks or even supper (almost everything, aside from the canvases she was given by her father, is for sale). At the Consell flea market, she moves hawk-like, instinctively attracted by the curious and colourful – from beribboned Union Jack flags to swaths of bargain-priced velvets in antique rose.

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 has been personally developed by Herold, drawing inspiration from the intense tones of renaissance frescoes. “It’s already quirky,” she says. “But there’s always room for more.” 

Having filled the townhouse with canvases and sculptures by artists including Florence Hutchings, Vera Edwards and Johannes Geccelli, Herold is happily leaning into the rhythms of Felanitx life. Next to her bed, in a tiny nook that mirrors the 14th‑century starry sky rendered by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel, sits a statue of Saint Anthony. The patron saint of animals is celebrated every January with a ceremony that sees his statue moved from the house into the square, followed by a procession in which people bring everything from flocks of sheep to owls to domestic pets to be blessed. For Herold, it’s just another day in the ever-shifting scene that plays out in the square below.