Elevator stories
Pernilla
Danielsson
Her home outside Palma.
Pernilla’s history with Mallorca goes back further than the decade she has spent photographing it. It started with childhood holidays, deepened through a teenage friendship with someone half-Mallorcan, and became permanent for an unglamorous, specific reason: she met her daughter’s father here, and the two of them stayed.
Life did what it does after that. The relationship ended; she and her daughter did not leave. Seven years ago she met her current partner, married him, and had a son. Somewhere in between, an early career as an art director in Sweden turned, almost sideways, into photography, and @lifestyle_mallorca became the account through which she has spent a decade looking at an island she had already decided to stay on.
Her own house, pictured here, is the most recent thing she has pointed that camera at.
Storage planned so nothing has to sit out to stay within reach.
On building a home around harmony
The renovation was guided by one word, harmony, which in practice meant cream lime-washed walls, stone sourced from the island itself, and storage planned with enough foresight that nothing has to sit out just to stay within reach. The result, she says, is meant to feel like checking into a good hotel, without ever having to leave home.
That last part is the harder trick. A hotel room gets to look calm because nobody actually lives there; a house has to look calm while absorbing a family’s daily use. Concealed storage is really just a bet that a room stays legible longer if you cannot see everything it is storing at once, and Pernilla built her home on that bet, room by room.
Mallorca gave me the feeling of coming home. Despite life taking unexpected turns, it became my sanctuary.
The bathroom she built around soft towels, a candle, fresh flowers.
On the bathroom, specifically
The bathroom is where she applies the idea most literally: a room built for the senses rather than for display, kept stocked with soft towels, a candle, fresh flowers. Her own recent renovation prioritised decluttering, warm tones and natural materials over anything more decorative, and out of it she has settled on three fixes she now considers non-negotiable, in her own home or a client’s:
- Concealed storage, so what you own does not have to be on display to be within reach.
- Hooks near the shower, so a towel is never further away than it needs to be.
- Real splash protection, so a shower does not mean mopping the floor afterward.
None of the three is about beauty. All three are about friction, the small daily kind that accumulates into a room you quietly start avoiding. Fix the friction, in her experience, and the beauty tends to follow on its own.
Her own visual education runs on a similarly low-friction principle: themallorcan.com and @luxurytastemaker for restaurant recommendations that update themselves, Pinterest for whatever she needs in the moment, and a subscription to the Spanish edition of AD for the one piece of inspiration that still arrives on paper. She says the day it drops through the mailbox is the best day of the month, and she says it without a trace of irony.