About us

Tell us, how did it all start?

It was not long after we first moved to Menorca. I was searching for a small studio space and then someone showed us this building. Raw, abandoned, derelict; its patio completely overgrown. Long echoed corridors opening up to large dark rooms, lit only by little rays of sun, trying to penetrate through boarded balcony doors and windows. A grand staircase led all the way up to the rooftop, where we looked at each other, both with that same feeling in our gut.

I still remember going for a glass of wine afterwards and before Sean managed to open his mouth I interrupted: “Don’t even think about it!”
“Why don’t we just… talk?” he replied.
One glass quickly turned into two, then three and before we turned around, the building was ours. Then we needed another bottle to figure out what to do with it.

So, wasn't the hotel something pre-planed?

Absolutely not. We are not hoteliers, nor investors, in a pure economic sense; I am an artist and Mojca writes. At that point we just knew we wanted to regenerate it, fill it with life.
We were very excited and ambitious about the design and overall aesthetic of it, without implying its marking some pioneering design pinnacle. There are lots of stunning projects out there, where the best architects and designers are united to achieve something truly innovative, but I do think it's different when you do it by yourself.

You are surrounded by four walls that are yours and you breathe with them. You sit, observe and wait for a knee jerk. Decisions are not based on some extensive market research of what is in but rather a result of intuition and personal inspirations. We hoped this would come through in the overall feel of it.

I heard all rooms are completely different from each other. How does the project's name, Fragile, conceptually wrap this idea?

We didn’t want it to look like a set design based on some pre-established theme. Colour palette was chosen according to how the light hits every single room; we wanted furniture to be minimal and breathy in order to enhance the building's very own architecture and history.

I think what gives the impression that rooms are different is that, instead of numbers, we named them and that room signs are embroidered sculpture and painting references.
We often get our guests puzzled by what does the name Atmosphere have to do with the portrait of Bernini’s Saint Teresa or name Spinning Plates with Michelangelo's Birth of Man and how does that conceptually fit into overall room design.
“Well, it doesn’t” says Sean, laughing. We didn’t mean anything too serious with it; we wanted to keep it playful and let people make their own sense out of it.

It is true that Michelangelo's pieta as a symbol of fragility and transitoriness somehow stands as its central piece, but that has more to do with our personal engagement in the project.
Fragile almost feels like our child, like a result of grand labour of love that, like every creation, comes with a lot of sensitivity and pain too.



The best part of it?

Once we had a young woman checking in and prior to her arrival someone phoned in a tearful voice: “My daughter is arriving today, …you will look after her, won’t you?”
It was heartbreakingly sweet and later we found out this was her first trip on her own after a long cancer treatment. And we did, we looked after her.

It's amazing how many people we had coming with their little life stories; some we laughed with, with others cried, some brought us flowers as a thank you. And that, I guess, is the whole point of it; these little precious moments when you realize that what you did meant something to someone else too.

What future holds for Fragile?

Two years ago this opportunity for collaboration came up. Three young and ambitious siblings, Isaac, Jesus and Mary, - they couldn’t have had better names for what our concept and emblem stands for - came like sent from heaven for our much needed break. So they opened their little restaurant in Fragile called Dos Camins and are now looking after it while we moved back to the UK to take a bit of a distance, a little breathing space to rest our heads and to get inspirations for the future.

Fragile feels like a life-long project; it has been through various transformations and changes over the years. Before it was a hotel it was a modern art gallery and although art remained an important element all the way through, we would like to put some more focus on it in the future, with exhibitions and events closely related to it.