House in Macieira / Nelson Resende Arquitecto

The existing construction, the target of our intervention, is a building that was vacant, easy to identify as “soft Portuguese” style, of which we should make the most of, adapting it to the new program.

The new proposal for the recovery and adaptation of the house, sought to maintain its essence, through an intervention, materially and formally little intrusive.

Given the programmatic ambition, the house was expanded in its volumetry, and two more volumes were proposed, one for a garage and the other for a winter garden, which compete to create a dynamic, exterior space, intermediated by the constructions that punctuate it and give it meaning.

Still, in the logic of avoiding an intervention too much out of the scale of the house, it was opted to use wood as the material that would resolve the structure and the coverings, interior and exterior, complemented by expressive glazed areas, modulated according to the rhythms of the wood, even if these were designed according to the rhythm of the house.

In this succession of dependencies, the house becomes a less compartmentalized, warmer, and therefore more welcoming building.

It no longer assumes the theoretical postulate that would be at the base of the original design, but another that results from the incorporation of the formal and material values of the intervention, now seen as a whole.

At this moment there is a register that is less turned in on itself, also because we tried to make the house relate in a more intense way with the surrounding garden space, and assume less of an objective character.

We no longer have a building that is affirmatively more formal and we start creating a context, a circumstance that welcomes, now, an experience more given to the garden, to the domestic space as a whole.