This project refers to the recovery of a bourgeois house from the beginning of the 20th century in Oporto city and had as its fundamental premise, the suiting of spaces and ways of living at that time to the current needs.

Based on this premise, in a first phase, the biggest challenge was to choose between what should be preserved and recovered and what should be replaced, added or adapted, without losing the value of the house.

It is a house with a romantic garden in the back, three floors, 571 square meters, which mixes Art Deco notes, with structural and artistic solutions prior to that movement, which shows itself to be a strongly striking set, but at the same time reveals itself without much criteria.

In this way, a first attempt was made in order to depurate the set, cleaning up the excesses and emphasizing the fundamental and effectively striking elements of the house, such as small friezes of the platibands and windows, the stained glass of the main staircase, the interior carpentry, the main structure made in wood and fundamentally the light inside the house, as result of the original composition of the elevations.

It was therefore adopted that these elements should be recovered and emphasized and everything else replaced or improved. Enlarging some of the interior spaces, such as the kitchen and the main room with the addition of the library and its area, as well as the bathrooms now were redesigned, one per room. The interior stairs were also reconfigured, and the elevator was added as a structural and functional element for the house.

In the exterior, there was a more contemporary approach, of a Brutalist character, with the design and extension of the ground floor, all in exposed concrete, which forms the volume of the garage and the swimming pool, and at the same time that its green roof allows it to be the garden of the house and an extension of the dining room and kitchen to the outside.

Finally, it should be noted that the house surroundings - of urban character - were set on the first expansions of the city downtown and where was a great number of houses dated from the beginning of the 20th century. For this reason, the Place turned out to be the basic premise of the project, that wanted to camouflage itself in the surroundings, depurating some of the existing parts without losing its greater historical value.

Team:

Architects: António Cruz Lopes