How the Berrow brothers built a different kind of development firm

The first full year Monty Berrow spent in Mallorca, he learnt two languages. One was Spanish. The other was construction.

Fresh from university in America, Berrow arrived in the Balearics to help his older brother, Archie, renovate a derelict townhouse in sun-dappled Sóller. Archie, then working in the yachting industry, had bought the crumbling property as a side project. Monty expected he’d spend a month or two pitching in, before “maybe getting a job back in England”.

Instead, the brothers accidentally laid the foundations for what would become Berrow, a family-led architectural design-build team which, for almost a decade, has been building up a name for itself in the Balearics. “There wasn’t a plan to create a development business,” says Berrow. “It was just one project to see where it goes.”

Monty Berrow

Archie Berrow

There was, however, plenty to learn. Not yet fluent in Spanish, Berrow spent his early days labouring alongside local builders, arriving on site early every morning, and playing football for the local town’s team in evenings. This immersion helped (as did Duolingo) and, six months later, he could finally hold a conversation. But, by then, he’d also picked up something even more valuable: an understanding of how a home is really put together.

But this process wasn’t wholly unfamiliar to the Berrows — during childhood, the brothers had watched their parents repeatedly buy neglected properties, nurse them back to homely health, live in them for several years, and move on. “So it wasn’t scary for us,” Berrow says of the townhouse task, “as we’d seen it a lot growing up.”

“There wasn’t a plan to create a business…”

That confidence, however, was soon tested. Berrow recalls how friends, family and banks financed their first project — a patchwork of funding that only barely covered costs. When the house was finished, the invoices kept rolling in, and the builders were soon knocking on the door. “But we just didn’t have the money,” says Berrow, explaining that selling the house wasn’t their business model at that point — it was a necessity, and the only way they could survive long enough to discover if there might even be a business. “It was all or nothing.”

Fortunately, the market moved with them. The house sold, everyone was paid, and the Berrow brothers were soon on the hunt for a second project. The first renovation had taught them how to rebuild a house — their second would teach them that they wanted to build a business.

Vistavall, Valldemossa

And Berrow is a business built differently. While most developers outsource everything, the Balearic-based company does precisely the opposite. The brothers brought architecture in-house, followed by interior design and project management. Then came marketing, and finally sales. But it wasn’t control for control’s sake. Instead, it was to give each project consistency, from start to finish. As Berrow puts it, no outside architect or estate agent would ever have “as much skin in the game”.

He remembers inviting a handful of estate agents to Patiki Townhouse — that first project. They could rattle off square footage stats and asking prices, Berrow says, “but they didn’t have a clue why we’d designed the house the way we did”. So the brothers simply decided to tell the story themselves.

Vistavall, Valldemossa

And there have been plenty of stories to tell. At Mon Cor, one of Berrow’s recent restorations, the original tiles were painstakingly lifted and protected before the house’s entire structure was rebuilt beneath them — only for them to be relaid exactly where they had been. At Vistavall, the defining space is a generous, open-plan living room designed to tell tales of its own — cosied up by the fireplace in winter, and with huge doors onto the terrace and pool that bring the outside in come summertime.

At Ca’n Domingo, which stands on a private estate or ‘finca’, vast boulders were uncovered during excavation. Rather than disposing of them, Berrow extracted them, had them cut by local craftsmen and used them to clad the property’s façade. “It's something that you wouldn't notice,” he says, “but it's something that we find quite special — it's a new house and everything is actually from the land itself.”

Ca'n Dominga, Sóller

This same thinking runs through every Berrow project, whether it’s restoring original features or reusing old beams and doors. “There's no way you can be more sustainable than just using what's already there,” Berrow says, while adding that he’s cautious about making too much noise around the subject. “We don't really talk about it in our marketing,” he says. “As we're quite conscious of greenwashing and people trying to talk about how sustainable they are.”

Because, for the Berrow brothers at least, the aim is less about the nuts, bolts and box-checking of it all — it’s about creating homes that belong in the Balearics. He talks about "respecting their surroundings and their heritage” — even when starting from scratch — so that new buildings never feel imposed on the landscape.

“We go for the opposite of minimalism,” says Berrow. “When a house is finished, we want it to feel like a real family home. Because we're trying to create finished homes here, not just boxes for someone else to move into.”