Amy Sherlock

Lubaina Himid is ready. In fact, you could say she’s been waiting.

Call it an ancestral pull. When Jean Porsche arrived in Menorca for the first time, five years ago, while working for a client, he felt immediately at home. The island recognised him, and he it. ‘My great-grandfather was from there,’ explained the Mexico-born, Madrid-based designer. ‘Perhaps it’s because of that.’ While on that project, he found himself standing in front of a SE VENDE sign posted in the window of an unassuming shopfront on an avenue in the island’s capital, Mahón.

‘The House on Utopia Parkway’ could be the title of a Wes Anderson film. The camera would pan across a row of cookie-cutter wooden houses with sloping Dutch gables and modest front yards: an imitation of old Europe in a distinctly New World suburbia. Inside, a gentle, grey-haired man sits at the kitchen table, cutting pictures of exotic birds from a reference book. His mother scolds him for leaving paper trimmings everywhere; his disabled brother watches the garden from the window.