The building in Rua de Camões (street) introduces a paradigm shift in what the studio practice is concerned. For the first time, we were challenged to go beyond the architectural design and embrace the furniture and decoration options of the whole. In the building, an Art Deco-inspired house was built in the second decade of the 20th century, with a spatial layout that was completely different from that of a typical house in Porto; it was intended to design an integrated unit of tourist-use, only composed by four small, 1-bedroom apartments.
The solution maintains the original spatial layout, characterized by a "front/rear" organization, with a side staircase, and it creates four apartments, where once there were different residential activities in the house. Contrary to previous projects, the exercise here was not to define boundaries between the present and the past, but rather to search and reinterpret formal and spatial contemporary solutions of the original house's construction.
We sought to design hierarchical spaces where different parts of each apartments' program are visually distinguished – kitchen, living room, dining room, bedroom – avoiding at the same time the compartmentalization as well as the temptation of an open space.
The furniture follows the premise. Elegant, eclectic, polychromatic, it lives from and to the house, creating a strongly poetic and emotional whole.
