House and villa renovations in Tarragona
Detached homes in the city and villas on the Llevant coast: every house has its own roof, its own four façades and its own outdoor space to coordinate. A job like this can’t be improvised — it’s planned in phases, the price is fixed before starting, and it’s managed on site.
A house isn’t just a bigger flat
In a flat, the façade and the roof belong to the residents’ association. In a house, they’re yours — and they’re exactly where a renovation is won or lost before you even get to finishes.
We renovate detached homes across Tarragona and the Tarragonès, but there’s one type we know especially well: the villa on the Llevant coast. Els Boscos, Cala Romana, the developments that look out to sea among the pines. Houses from the 70s, 80s and 90s, many of them second homes, built when insulation was a vague idea and rooms were divided up out of habit. Big on square metres, short on comfort.
The other difference is scale. Two hundred square metres spread across two or three floors means more services, longer runs of plumbing and heating, and a staircase that organises the flow of the whole house. But it also means more scope: opening up the ground floor into a single living space, moving the bedrooms to face the right way, bringing the sea light into the living room instead of leaving it trapped in a small window. That kind of scope, a flat rarely has.
Where a house renovation starts
Not with the kitchen, and not with the colour of the walls. A house is renovated from the outside in, starting with what protects it from the coastal climate — the August sun, the salt air, the tramontana wind — and with everything you can’t see:
- The roof. The first suspect behind almost any damp problem, and the part that takes the most punishment. Checking the roof, redoing the waterproofing and insulating underneath it changes the comfort of the top floor and the bills for the whole year.
- Insulation. Uninsulated façades, or ones with empty cavities, explain the cold in January and the heat that won’t leave in summer. It’s solved from the inside with a lining layer, or from the outside with external wall insulation (SATE), depending on what each house allows.
- Exterior windows and doors. Frames with a thermal break and good glazing: less noise, less spent on heating and cooling, and no more draughts from the old aluminium sliding doors.
- The services. Water, electrics and climate control redone from the consumer unit outwards. In a thirty-year-old house, pipework and wiring have usually reached the end of their working life; renewing them now, with the walls open, costs a fraction of what it would cost later.
With the building envelope sorted, the house is ready for everything else. When the work covers the whole property, the approach is that of a full home renovation: a single project, a fixed-price quote broken down by item, and someone in charge who’s on site often.
The outside matters too
In a villa, half of life happens outdoors. The porch where you eat dinner from May to October, the pool, the patch of garden, the terraces that look out to sea: they’re as much a part of the house as the living room, and deserve to be part of the project from the start, not tacked on as an afterthought.
- The porch and terraces. Continuous flooring between the living room and the outdoors erases the mental step between inside and out. Pergolas, awnings or louvres to tame the evening sun, and electrics designed for summer nights.
- The pool and its surroundings. We renew the surrounding paving, the coping and the pool area; for the shell and filtration we rely on specialists coordinated within the same job, so there aren’t two separate jobs that don’t talk to each other.
- The garden as another room. We don’t do landscaping, but we do leave the irrigation, outdoor lighting, water point and the connection for an outdoor kitchen or barbecue ready to go. That way the garden can grow later without digging anything up again.
When the inside and the outside are planned together, the house reads as a single thing, rather than a sum of rooms plus a patio.
Have a house or villa that needs a serious renovation? Come and show us round, and we’ll tell you where we’d start.
The villa, seen as a design project
A big house offers something a flat almost never can: room for design to breathe. A double-height space, a picture window framing the sea, a staircase that becomes the heart of the house instead of a mere means of getting between floors. Making the most of it isn’t about budget — it’s about deciding to, in time.
That’s why, in houses where clients ask for it, the renovation goes hand in hand with an interior design project: materials, light and proportion planned for the whole home at once, not room by room. And if your house is on the Llevant coast, we have a page dedicated to the area — renovations in Els Boscos and Cala Romana — covering what we typically find in those villas and how we deal with it.
Frequently asked questions
Can the house be renovated in phases and can I keep living in it?
In many detached homes, yes. We can do the ground floor first while you live upstairs, or sort out the building envelope and services first and leave the finishes for a second stage. Each phase closes with its own fixed-price quote, so at every point you know exactly what you’ve contracted for and what’s still to come.
My villa is from the 1980s and costs a fortune to heat and cool. How much can that improve?
This is where the change shows most. Many coastal houses were built with no insulation and aluminium window frames with no thermal break. Insulating the roof and walls, changing the windows and properly sizing the heating and cooling system transforms both the bills and the comfort all year round. In the project we tell you which improvements genuinely pay off in your case, and which don’t.
Do you also handle the pool and the garden?
To be honest: the pool shell and landscaping are specialist trades in their own right, and for those we work with trusted specialists coordinated within the same job. What we do handle ourselves is everything that connects the house to the outdoors: surrounding paving, the pool coping, porch, irrigation, lighting, and the water and power points you’ll need outside afterwards.
The house is a second home and I don’t live in Tarragona. How do you keep me updated?
Through a single site manager who sends you updates with photos and flags anything important before deciding on it. Our office is in the Eixample, in the centre of Tarragona, and the Llevant coast is ten minutes away: we’re on site often, not once a month. We schedule visits for when you can come down, and we handle the rest.
Who handles the licence for a major job on a detached house?
We do. Renovating a whole house usually needs a major-works licence with a technical project. We prepare the documentation, submit it to Tarragona City Council or whichever Tarragonès municipality applies, and follow it through until the permit is in hand. You don’t have to deal with any of the paperwork.
Let’s talk about your renovation.
Leave us four details and we’ll call you to arrange the visit. No pressure, with clear guidance from the very first moment.
Or call us 977 27 92 72