15-centimetre concrete plane folds down an Ibiza hillside

A white-concrete plane just 15 centimetres thick folds down a hillside to form Bellavista 11, a minimalist villa overlooking the sea in Ibiza by Spanish studio Fran Silvestre Arquitectos. That single thin element does nearly all the structural and spatial work: it adapts to the slope, wraps the interiors, and turns into terraces along the way.

Bellavista 11 is the first villa completed in The Roca Views development, a cluster of six homes designed by the Valencia-based studio in Roca Lisa, on Ibiza's eastern coast. All six will share pared-back, rectilinear forms with thin white walls — a contemporary take on the island's traditional whitewashed buildings.

How does one plane organise an entire house?

The design started from a question. "The project begins with a very simple question, 'Can we build on this hillside by placing a single element on it?'," studio founder Fran Silvestre told Dezeen.

"The aim is to create a continuous element that follows the topography and, through its different folds, gradually finds the best conditions offered by the site," he explained. "It is an apparently very simple operation that allows many things to be resolved at once – adapting to the slope, organising the programme, orienting each room towards a different condition of the landscape and extending the architecture to generate shade."

The mechanism works like this: the plane steps down the slope, and each step becomes usable space. The house divides across three low-slung volumes — a garage and access stair at the top, a central social block, and a block of five bedrooms at the bottom. As the 15-centimetre plane descends, it creates roof terraces over the lowest two volumes and folds around to form the interior floor plates and a series of lower terraces. For scale, 15 centimetres is roughly the width of a standard laptop — thin enough that the walls read as folded paper rather than mass.

What role does tradition play?

Silvestre frames the villa as an update of Mediterranean building know-how, not a break from it. "We like to think in terms of an evolved tradition, learning from what works in Mediterranean architecture – shade, protection from the sun, clarity of materials – and resolving it through contemporary construction techniques," he said.

The programme is straightforward. An open-plan living, dining and kitchen space sits alongside a swimming pool, while the bedroom block overlooks a seating terrace. Full-height sliding glass doors with slender frames and hidden tracks connect both to the outdoors.

Inside, the material palette stays deliberately sparse: white walls, pale stone floors and timber carpentry. The point, according to the studio, is light. "White appears naturally because of its relationship with traditional Mediterranean architecture and because of its performance under intense solar radiation," Silvestre explained. "At the same time, it allows light to transform the spaces throughout the day. This is something that particularly interests us, we understand light almost as another material within the project."

Where does this fit in the studio's work?

Silvestre founded his eponymous practice in 2005. The studio has a track record with singular geometric gestures: a Madrid house completed in a cluster of white cylindrical volumes, the stepped Villa 95 in Andalusia, and the winding Sabater House in Alicante.

Bellavista 11 now sets the template for the five remaining Roca Views villas, which will test whether this folded-plane logic can repeat across an entire hillside development. Photography is by Jesus Orrico.

By Elena Vasquez