the house that Jørn built
As one of two homes on a Spanish island that share an architect with the Sydney Opera House, Can Feliz reaffirms Jørn Utzon’s reputation for iconic buildings by the sea.
Can Feliz means ‘ house of happiness’ in the Balearic dialect of Majorca, but Lin Utzon’s island home is much more than merely joyous. Meditative, restorative, an exemplar of nuanced Modernism in action, Can Feliz was designed by Lin’s father, Jørn Utzon, and completed in 1994. It was the Utzons’ second house in Majorca. The first, Can Lis (named after Jørn’s wife, Lin’s mother), was finished in 1972, five years after the Utzons first visited the Spanish island having fled Sydney and the furore surrounding the overdue and over-budget Opera House. “Can Lis is the eternal temple,” says Lin. “You enter it and all your worries drop away; you are in the universe.” You are also teetering on the edge of an escarpment that plummets straight into the sea, exposed to glaring sun, salt spray, rain and wind. Can Lis — essentially a series of individual pavilions — shines for its purity, if not its practicality. “Can Feliz, my house, was built with the same integrity,” Lin continues, “with the same quality of local stone and terracotta but also with a degree more pragmatism.” Seen from the valley, the pale pink sandstone home nestles with quiet authority in its pine-covered surrounds. Composed as a series of horizontal planes elaborated over several terraces, the house contains, at its core, communal areas and sleeping quarters to one side, the entrance to the other. “It’s a big house, but there are only two bedrooms,” Lin says, laughing. “My father planned it for my mother and himself, with the occasional family visitor.” She has altered very little (“I removed one wall, for instance, and even that felt like sacrilege”) but has added some guest houses around the grounds. Lin Utzon was born in Denmark eight months after the end of the Second World War. When she was 15, her father moved the family to Sydney so he could oversee the complicated and increasingly controversial construction of the Opera House. Five years later, following a change of government and amid public outcry, Utzon withdrew as chief architect of the Opera House and hurriedly packed up his family and flew home to Denmark. “It was extremely painful to have to leave Sydney,” Lin remembers. “We’d not been there long but they were extremely important years to me. I was in love with the place, I was in love with someone, I didn’t want to leave but the situation was such that I simply couldn’t stay.” Lin had been studying painting and sculpture at East Sydney Technical College, and later expanded her interest into textile arts. ››