SAMI Arquitectos Have Transformed a Ruin into a Vacation Home

SAMI Arquitectos have used a ruin to design a vacation home on the island of Pico, Portugal.

Description by SAMI Arquitectos: A ruin was the starting point for the design of a holiday house in the island of Pico. The project came from the will to maintain a ruin and thinking of a house that would value it, a house that could be modelled to it and take advantage at the same time, offering the most diverse and complex possibilities of living than the former typology.

Since the building is approached at the level of the covering, because of the slope of the land, we designed all the covering of the project as if they were decks, allowing to be used as sitting places or for contemplation.

The house, modelled inside the walls of stone, was designed with generous openings, for light to come inside and to contemplation of the landscape. These openings are sometimes lined up, and sometimes not, with the former openings of the ruin, creating new frames and relations with the original limits of the house.

The project is a movement between a limit line, in stone, and the intervention volumes that are led by that same line, but sometimes flow independently or extend, whenever the necessity of space or of a view is needed.

Architecture: Inês Vieira da Silva. Miguel Vieira SAMI-arquitectos
Photography: Paulo Catrica
Location: São Miguel Arcanjo, São Roque do Pico, Pico Island, Azores, Portugal
Team: Bruna Silva, João do Vale Martins, Rita Maria Pinto
Trainee Daniel Mentech
Structural Engineering: Eng. Ricardo Ferro Antunes, Eng. Francisco Mendonça Santos
Water and Sanitation: Eng. Paulo Jorge Almeida Oliveira
Electrical Engineering: Eng. Hugo Mendonça
Construction Company: José Artur Cruz Leal – Unipessoal, Lda
Furniture: SAMI with Loja Nord