Helios Hotels Restaurant.

Helios Hotels is a hotel chain with a presence along the Spanish Mediterranean coast, with properties in well-known tourist destinations such as Lloret de Mar, Benidorm, Almuñécar, and Mallorca. These large buildings, originally developed during Spain’s tourism boom of the 1970s, are now entering a new phase of transformation and hotel renovation.

With the aim of offering a renewed experience to its guests, Helios Hotels is redefining its positioning by focusing on well-being, sport, and slow tourism. This evolution is also supported by a new gastronomic concept inspired by the Mediterranean diet, featuring fresh, locally sourced products and understanding hotel dining as an essential part of the travel experience.

Within this context, Helios Mallorca entrusted Trenchs Studio, a Barcelona-based interior design studio, with the radical transformation of the image of its buffet restaurant. The challenge of the interior design project was to turn a space of over 600 m²—organized around a large central buffet and subject to high user turnover in very concentrated time periods—into a pleasant, intimate, and relaxed environment capable of reflecting the values of calm and well-being that define the chain’s new identity.

The interior design proposal is built on a deep connection with the place. Mallorca, a Mediterranean island with a millennia-old history and a culture closely linked to the land and its materials, becomes the starting point for the project. From this context emerges the choice of a palette of natural materials and textures—warm woods, ceramics, stone, and natural fiber fabrics—that create a serene, honest, and timeless atmosphere in the restaurant design.

Starting from the buffet as the central element, the restaurant is organized into a sequence of smaller areas that visually reduce the overall scale and avoid the perception of a single, continuous dining hall. Different types of hospitality furniture—tables in various formats, built-in benches, lightweight chairs, and a large landscaped island—allow for multiple ways of using the space and encourage a more human and flexible dining experience.

The relationship with the outdoors is key to the restaurant experience. The space opens fully onto the hotel garden, integrating vegetation as an intrinsic part of the interior and extending the dining area onto the outdoor terrace. The continuity of materials and furniture strengthens this connection, blurring the boundary between inside and outside and allowing guests to enjoy the Mediterranean setting at any time of day.

The ceramic latticework, also characteristic of 1970s architecture, becomes one of the defining elements of the interior design project. Used as a visual and light filter, it allows separation without enclosure, controls sightlines, and creates spatial depth, providing a strong Mediterranean identity reinterpreted through a contemporary language. This element dialogues with the ceramic flooring featuring graphic geometry, which introduces rhythm and texture to the circulation and reinforces the zoning of the space without resorting to rigid partitions.

The restaurant’s lighting design, always warm and predominantly accent-based, accompanies each table and area, creating contrasts of light and shadow that add depth and help shape an enveloping atmosphere.
Acoustic comfort was a fundamental aspect of the project. A system of foam slats integrated into the ceiling resolves sound absorption while simultaneously introducing a continuous texture that organizes the space and reinforces its architectural reading. This acoustic solution allows a sense of calm to be maintained even during periods of high occupancy.

As a functional complement, custom-designed service furniture was created to house coffee machines, juice machines, and toasters, discreetly integrated into the architecture. These elements can be closed during dinner service, allowing the space to achieve greater visual clarity and reinforcing a calmer, more relaxed atmosphere as night falls.

The result is a buffet restaurant that transcends its purely functional nature to become a place to linger, where architecture, materiality, light, and comfort work together to transform an intensive program into a serene experience, fully aligned with the new identity of Helios Hotels and the Mediterranean spirit that defines the location. A restaurant renovation project in Mallorca that combines contemporary design with Mediterranean tradition.