Collection: Building a Mediterranean villa

New build or a total reform.  That's the main question for anyone considering  a property  investment in our area.  Our area meaning Alicante province and mainly Javea, Moraira, Denia and around as these are of no doubts the main pearls in the beautiful Costa Blanca crown. 

Who we are and why our advice matter

Colores De La Tierra  is a local company dedicating itself to the property development business including restoration,  remodelling and redesigning old houses, creating unique and special spaces, landscaping and creating gardens and a new contruction.  We are a small but dedicated team with vast experience and with a vision, too. A designer, an architect, a professional building team and an investment banker and we know how to make it all work. 

Buy an old house and we will make it as good as new and still keep the character 

Mostly these white villas with tiled roofs looking so romantic on the mountain slopes are from early 80s, with small windows, small rooms and tiny bathrooms, with no heating system at all and no proper insulation. Actually their main insulation system is the underbuild which was never designed  to become a living space but served as a protection from the unescapable humidity. Some of these houses were built as a development in the place of an earlier construction and one can identify the remains of it as old as sometimes a full one hundred years  in some parts of the house. Could be an old casa de campo  (rural house) surrounded by acres of olive groves.  It is pretty amazing that one can still find those old houses sometimes even well preserved but usually with a smaller plot than necessary to be able to renovate such a house, build the swimming pool, let alone the fact that  in most cases there is no electricity and water connection. Still lots of people intend to buy them for their beautiful location and a naive idea that it is cheaper renovating the existing house than building a new one which is not always the case.

First of all. If the plot is smaller than 10 000 m2 , there is zero hope to legally renovate the house. Even if you do it at your own risk, the only way to have an electricity in this case is installing solar panels (which is fine ) and water from the rain deposit (which is ok to water the garden but not to use it in the household). And it will be 100% illegal.  If one is willing to live on those green acres of agricultural land, it is possible if the plot is at least 10 000 m2 large. And SeaView is actually offering now that kind of a plot, actually twice that big,  full 20 000 m2, with its own small forest at the foot, arranged in several  bancales (terraces built on the slopes for growing grapes, olives, even oranges). The water and electricity connection  has been done. It is fully fenced. And the building license for a project of a 450 m2 house with a swimming pool has been approved.  The building project can be bought together with it or you can buy just a plot with a license and build the house yourself. 

check 

Coming back to the typical white villa with its 1000-2000 m2 garden and a pool mostly built in 80s and probably renovated several times since then. It is one of the most popular investment in our area. And with modern technologies and materials it is possible to remodel it to the excellent level of comfort, redistribute the space inside, equip with modern heating and water-heating system an energy saving solutions. This is our most popular job and we have several ongoing projects at the moment.  

Those antique houses are still there, in the campo and in the streets of old towns. In Jávea  one can find old townhouses built totally from tosca, the local type of unpolished porous travertine-like stone but mainly they are built from old soft calcium-containing stones and those old walls are 70cm thick and actually do their job but they are occupying too much space and though it might be interesting to preserve those walls on the outside, it is worth getting rid of them on the inside to open the space and let the light travel through unobstructed. With modern materials and technologies it is possible. The low ceiling is another problem. A minimum height of the ceiling should be 250 cm, otherwise the renovation project will not be approved.  The townhouse is a story of its own. If you are considering buying one to actually live in it, it most certainly will be in need of a huge reform. Sometimes you are basically buying the solar,  a building plot with lots of obligations and some rights attached to it. It is not the most popular investment as it is usually a complicated one, due to the long and painful project approval process, too narrow streets with no access for the delivery trucks, huge building budget and a high initial price or it can even be protected as a heritage, in this case a naive foreigner will be hopelessly stuck there (true story). Anyway normal modern building practices might be useless here. Lots of manual labor involved making it difficult to control both the schedule and the budget. So buying casa the pueblo, a townhouse in the old town, one should implement a diligent study involving  a builder, an architect and even a local town hall if possible. 

We are still doing it though, investing in the antique townhouses and remodelling them as we are very fond of old stones and beautiful local towns. There is one ongoing project right now where Colores De La Tierra is a builder and a co-investor. It is been recently placed on the market and will be completed in October 2022 as a totally new home  perfectly  fit to live all year round and enjoy the authentic  lifestyle of an old Mediterranean town at a modern living standard.

And finally the new build.  Contemporary style architecture  of simple, mainly rectangular-shaped white buidings generally referred to as an Ibiza style house, has become very popular in the last 5 years. No tiled roofs, no brown-clay pavements, no castilian wooden doors but large open spaces, huge windows, light-coloured  floors and bathrooms of porcelanico (thin but extremely hard big-sized porcelain tiles). This is the main trend in our area.  Though if someone still prefers a tiled roof and a classic mediterranean villa  it's been proved that it would never go out of fashion.  Actually in some areas of Javea it is not allowed to have a flat roof, tiles must cover not less than 75% of the roof. That's the way to preserve the historical look of the town. 

Finding the site Buying the plot will be the first step. Not at all sufficient though. You cannot build before you have the building project approved by town hall which takes quite some time. Depends a lot on the particular town, the nature of the project, the particular area. An architect. So make it a year. The local burocracy makes it real slow but the good news is that we build quickly.