Inland from Dénia's municipal boundary, among carob-tree terraces and old rural paths, dozens of farmhouses built more than a century ago still survive. For decades they remained on the margins of real estate interest, which focused almost exclusively on the coast, but in recent years any architect in Dénia has noticed a clear shift: more and more owners are looking to restore these traditional buildings and turn them into contemporary design villas, without losing their original character.
What makes a farmhouse special
Marina Alta farmhouses tend to share highly recognisable construction features: local stone masonry walls, pitched roofs with traditional Arabic tiles, cisterns for collecting rainwater, and ground floors originally intended for storing tools or housing animals. Far from being an obstacle, these features have become the main point of difference from new-build homes: thick walls with excellent thermal inertia, proportions and volumes hard to replicate today, and a relationship with the agricultural landscape that no newly developed plot can offer.
The technical challenge, however, is considerable. Many of these buildings lack foundations in the modern sense of the term, show structural issues accumulated over decades of neglect, and require careful intervention to avoid losing the very elements that justify the restoration in the first place.
Restoring is not just renovating
There's an important difference between renovating a conventional home and restoring a protected or listed farmhouse. In certain cases, Dénia town hall's catalogue of protected heritage sets specific conditions on which elements must be preserved — façades, roofs, certain openings — and which allow freer intervention. Ignoring this listing status in the early stages of a project can later force documentation to be redone and the building permit renegotiated, with the resulting delay.
A good restoration project usually combines structural consolidation of original elements — load-bearing walls, roofs, cisterns recovered as landscape features — with clearly differentiated contemporary interventions: large glazed panels, added volumes in modern materials, or pools that engage with the agricultural setting without imitating it. This coexistence between old and new is precisely what distinguishes a design villa resulting from a well-executed restoration from a simple renovation.
Why interest in this type of project is growing
Growing interest in restoring inland properties in Dénia responds to several factors: the scarcity of new-build seafront plots, international buyers' search for a more distinctive type of property, and an increasing sensitivity towards sustainability — understood here as reusing what already exists rather than building from scratch. Studios such as La Quinta Fachada, along with other practices experienced in heritage restoration in the Marina Alta, agree that this type of project requires a team with specific training in building pathology, something not always needed in conventional new-build work.
What to check before buying a property to restore
Before purchasing a farmhouse with the intention of restoring it, it's worth requesting information from Dénia town hall on its possible heritage listing status, commissioning a structural pathology report, and verifying the plot's actual buildable area, which on rural land is usually subject to very different conditions from those on urban land.
