Located in the street Eng. Duarte Pacheco in Loulé, Algarve, the house is part of sequence of buildings built against the old walls from the XIII century. Making the walls almost unnoticed to who crosses the street.
The house with one floor is part of a set of vernacular houses with elementary and sober constructive elements in the area. In the back yard of the house, a labyrinth space, let us see part of the old walls as they have become covered over time with additions and annexes.
The rules imposed to maintain the existing volumetry and the street elevation, which has led us to work only with the inner space of the existing house.
To fulfill the new owners program, all the interior was rebuilt and redesign to accommodate a three bedrooms house and many space for storage. The back patio was redefined to a bigger space to clarify the relation with the old walls and to allow the natural light and ventilation to enter inside the house.
In the ground floor, the living room and the kitchen work as a link space between the entrance, in the south, the back patio and the corridors to the private area.
All the bedrooms face the back patio looking for the needed privacy from the street; In the first floor the corridor is open for the living space to reduce the low ceiling sensation.
The floor slab and the ceiling slab, was built all in wood with the beams visible to increase the ceiling height and to allow to have two floors inside the existing house volume.
The house have a constant presence of the wood, in one hand, because allows thinner and lighter structural elements, and in other hand to fulfill the owners storage demand which allowed us to design all the furniture: the kitchen, the living room, the stair, the corridor and in the bedrooms.
The traditional hydraulic tiles floor with high contrast between blacks and whites clarifies the limit between the open space of the living rooms and the kitchen; in the bedrooms and private spaces rules the traditional Portuguese pine floor.
