Casa em Lourosa. Santa Maria de Feira
he ground, a long and narrow allotment, was a large slope filled with pine trees and eucalyptus that immaterialized the top of a small street crowded with little disordered and atypical houses.
The land was divided in two parts in order to build the house:
One part maintained the original level and the eucalyptus were cut leaving the pine trees.
The other part, the one to build the house, was leveled with the street and an abstract garden with grass, gravel, granite cube and IPE wood was made.
A 2,50 m plastered concrete wall between the two grounds supports the house and separates it from the context.
The house is a series of volumes connected to the wall alternating with shown concrete slab that defines the two floors.
The garage defines the first façade and is entangled with the walls and with the entrance protecting the orange yard that draws the house further back from the street.
In the south, the entrance is defined making for the metallic staircase, drawing a hall and large and only living room with a sliding window for the garden, next to a small fireplace.
The kitchen hides in the north and leans the concrete slab against the land’s wall.
Above the rooms are set over the original level of the ground and they outline the volumes in balconies that hide the real scale of the windows.
The condensed scale house extends in the contrasts, colors and textures: shown concrete slab, brown plastered concrete walls, black metallic frameworks with grey glasses, granite cube in the outside pavement, IPE wood floors in the balconies and yards, orange courtyard as the curtains in the living room, Cascais’s blue kitchen, yellow tiles bathrooms, interior walls, doors and cabinets lacquered in dry yellow and Sucupira wood floor everywhere, with black steel plates staircase shining and outlining the space and the light.
Outside, the façades became neo-plastic almost Mondrian or Der Sthill. Lines and plans run in contrasts, ones over the others, immaterializing the space and volume. Is like an abstract figuration in a horizontal and artificial garden.
Inside the opposite happens, the plans disappear, and space, volume and depth remain. The pine trees are always outside the windows (that from inside look like real windows) and the figuration becomes natural. An unstable and natural landscape that reminds the real origin of the place.
Nuno Brandão Costa
Porto, January 2007
