The Eleven House: Susanna Cots’ shared home in the heart of l’Empordà

Located at number 11 on carrer Major in Peratallada, one of the most beautiful and best-preserved medieval villages in l’Empordà (Girona), The Eleven House is probably Susanna Cots’ most personal project. More than an exercise in interior design, it is a house conceived as a space for shared living: shop, meeting place, creative laboratory and gallery. A project where architecture and biography intertwine.

Designed under a slow philosophy — the same that accompanies the designer’s personal and professional life — the house was conceived to create a place where time expands and the boundaries between disciplines dissolve. It is not a permanently inhabited dwelling, but it is deeply lived. A house that, as Susanna Cots and Alex Juvé explain, discovered them: “houses find you, and we were waiting for it.” A space that gathers the essence of their studio, where they share their perception of beauty, nature and emotion.

A discovery that reshaped the project

The intervention began with an 18th-century house in a state of ruin. During construction, an unexpected discovery reformulated the meaning of the project: after removing successive construction layers, a fragment of Peratallada’s medieval wall — built between the 12th and 13th centuries — emerged, crossing the interior of the house. The finding was integrated as a presence that reorganises the spatial narrative. The wall, now visible in the boutique area, becomes the historical and symbolic anchor of the house. From that moment on, the project took a more ambitious direction: to preserve, share and activate a place that already contained centuries of memory.

A house conceived to be shared

The Eleven House unfolds across three floors and 140 m², complemented by an outdoor area of 100 m². The layout responds less to conventional domestic logic than to a sequence of uses linked to encounter. The entrance space, opening directly onto carrer Major, has been transformed into a small design boutique. Here, objects for the home, personal care pieces, books and artworks coexist alongside collections designed by Susanna Cots herself. The space rests on the stone walls recovered during the restoration, where original materiality acts as a silent backdrop.

On the first floor, the house adopts a more domestic approach. A fully equipped kitchen allows for gatherings, meals or presentations. The Solitaire piece by bulthaup takes centre stage and also serves as a display for the Onze ceramic collection, designed by the interior designer and produced in the Empordà. Next to the kitchen, a dining area with a table for eleven guests and a living room with a fireplace form a continuous space conceived for conversation and pause.

Between everyday life and shared experience

The house is conceived as a place full of life: workshops, gatherings, creative sessions and private celebrations form part of its usual programme. The architecture offers a flexible framework where different ways of inhabiting can unfold.

The upper floor hosts the most versatile space in the house. Here, practices linked to wellbeing take place, such as meditation or yoga sessions, accompanied by small domestic rituals — breakfasts, shared pauses — that reinforce the intimate dimension of the place. But it is also where the house opens to its most public side: the art gallery.

A gallery as a natural extension of the house

The Eleven Gallery emerges as a natural extension of the project, where art and everyday life coexist effortlessly. The exhibitions, constantly evolving, activate the upper floor as a place for observation and encounter, maintaining the intimate scale that defines the entire house. Artists exhibited include Jimmy Millán, Pati Baztán, Cristina Blanch, Cécile Bercovici, Anna Carmona, Sara N. Bergman, Beatriz Montero, Mireia Abras, Tània Font and Conrad Roset, among others.

This hybrid condition — between home, creative refuge and cultural space — defines the project’s singularity. The house remains open and available to different readings and uses.

The exterior as a space of continuity

At the rear, a garden of approximately 100 m² extends the experience outdoors. Here, the furniture is by Calma, designed by Inma Bermúdez with the complicity of Andreu Carulla. A small shed next to the secondary entrance structures this area, which serves as a setting for workshops, intimate concerts, wine tastings or breakfasts after yoga sessions. Rather than an ornamental garden, it is a space of continuity: a natural extension of the house where time is perceived differently and where collective activity acquires a more sensory dimension.

A house as a quiet manifesto

The Eleven House is, in essence, a built manifesto, grounded in the coherence between intention and form. The recovery of a historical structure, attention to human scale and the will to share shape a project that moves between the domestic and the cultural. In this sense, the house condenses many of the constants in Susanna Cots’ work: the search for calm, the construction of contained atmospheres and an understanding of interior design as a discipline capable of structuring experiences. Here, however, that gaze becomes more direct, more autobiographical.

The Eleven House is a place of quiet intensity, where architecture, memory and everyday life intertwine naturally. A house not permanently inhabited, yet always open as a shared space — a territory of encounters and a vital synthesis of a trajectory.

Project: The Eleven House.
Location: Peratallada, Empordà (Girona)
Completed: 2019
Surface: 140 m2 + 100 m2 jardín
Author: Susanna Cots Interior Design.
Photography: Mauricio Fuertes.
Kitchen: diseño Susanna Cots y Solitaire de Bulthaup.
Furniture: Mesa y sillas de Dareels. Butacas Norr11. Mobiliario exterior Calma Outdoor.
Flooring: Matimex.
Lighting: Cronek, diseño de Susanna Cots, para iluminación jardín; Simon y Maison de Vacances (lámparas comedor).

Susanna Cots

Few interior designers in Spain have developed such a distinctive and coherent language as Susanna Cots. Her work—shaped by a deep connection to nature and emotional wellbeing—unfolds from her studio in the serene landscape of the Empordà region, infusing each project with a sense of clarity, balance and quiet beauty. Her approach has garnered recognition both nationally and internationally for its aesthetic sensitivity and conceptual depth.  View full biography.

Project by Susanna Cots