House in Arrábida

In the heart of the Arrábida Natural Park, a region with a characteristically Mediterranean climate, a 4-hectare property of native flora contained a house built in the1990s, sheltered by stone pine trees.

In this privileged climate, 30 minutes from downtown Lisbon and 10 minutes from the sheltered sea of Portinho da Arrábida, the owners wanted to create a comfortable space for relaxation, closely connected to the land and the landscape of the park.

The existing building was structurally weak, inefficiently laid out, and lacked spatial clarity, further exacerbated by successive additions. However, the location was fabulous,surrounded by robust native vegetation that created a serene atmosphere where time seems to pass slowly.

The project faced the challenge of interacting with a questionable pre-existence, of traditional aesthetic type and a poor design that did not suit the clients' intended use, nor did it minimally engage with the context. It was a concrete structure, inflexible, making any truly transformative work a large and complex undertaking.

The approach was the opposite. The project embraced the house with its deficiencies and focused on enhancing its strengths and incorporating small operations that would, with minimal effort, improve the relationship with the outside and clarify the space. The project acts with precision. The first decision was to accept that the most valuable part of the project would be the place, which was already there. From there, the focus shifted to seeking the minimum necessary materials to create comfort and connect the interior and exterior without spoiling anything.

The intervention strategy centered on three decisions:

Make the most of the existing: demolish the minimum to clarify spatially.

Spatially reorganize the interior with captures from the outside, through new visual connections that bring the park landscape inside.

The use of natural materials with excellent haptic qualities, comfortably mediating the skin-nature relationship.

The existing east-west organization was kept, with living spaces oriented south and service areas to the north. The original configuration of the south-facing porch was restored, expanding it with a water tank among the trees, to function as an outdoor room, swept by the breeze cooled by the water. The entire floor was covered with terracotta tiles, a nearby natural material, fired at low temperature, with excellent tactile properties, acoustic absorption, and humidity regulation. New wooden windows were designed and strategically placed, externally protected by wooden shutters, which allow for the creation of the necessary shaded and ventilated atmosphere in the summer and the required thermal gains in the winter by exposing the closed glass.

The intervention is quiet and rigorous, delicate, simple, and economical, focused on achieving a pleasant and comfortable habitat in close relationship with the place. We believe that this economy of means, respect for the place, and precision in intervening in the built environment are central to sustainable development, leading to a more interesting result when pre-existence and intervention are combined than if everything had been redone.

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