Quinta da Amieira project aimed to remodel and expand a family wooden house built in the 70s in the heart of the city of Maia, Porto.

The house had been empty for several years was for decades the home of a family of 6 who gradually abandoned it.

Inserted in a plot of 7000m2 punctuated by cork oaks, chestnut trees and alders, the house had a typical Midwest design, a wooden box resting on a solid concrete plinth, with a fiber cement roof.

Although mostly built in wood and completely surrounded by trees and plants, the house remained a strange object to the context 50 years after its construction.

The only connection between the interior and the exterior was the entrance door, with no interaction between the interior spaces and the exuberant exterior.

Although the family had not inhabited this space for a long time, they still felt strongly emotionally attached to it. They intended to intervene in the house and the surrounding land with the aim of creating not a family home but a family’s house, where grandparents, children and grandchildren could meet, spend the night, enjoy the garden, cultivate and even raise some animals.

The house should materialize the family spirit, the pleasure of socializing, the taste for nature and intergenerational learning.

As main conditions we defined the thermal improvement, the increase of internal luminosity, the increase in the number of rooms and the conversion of all the accommodations into suites. The exterior should build a buffer zone for the neighborhood with a multi-family character, a small cultivation area, an area for raising small animals, a swimming pool and some utility buildings to support the whole.

The character of the preexistence showed the way, Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie and Schwartz houses would serve as a models for the project.

All the pre-existence elements were reused, interior walls, exterior walls, functional distribution, and location of openings. Yet the house gains a new character. From the Midwest jumps to the Hamptons. The brown of the wood changes to white, the small windows become doors, the interior kitchen is relocated in a glass box facing north that relates intimately with the garden and the interior circulations are illuminated through the introduction of skylights, that rescue light to spaces that were once taciturn and dark.

The living/dining room, hidden for decades from the space that surrounded it, opens onto the garden through the creation of an outdoor terrace on two levels that ends in the swimming pool.

The outdoor space, designed by atelier OhLand! develops from the creation of a vegetation cover to the surroundings and a winding path, which goes around the preexisting trees, sometimes approaching or moving away from the house, creating different landscapes within the property.