40 m2 Studio Designed and Equipped to Be a Home-Office for an Architect

Project: Home-Office for an Architect
Architects: José Castro Caldas
Location: Lisboa, Portugal
Area: 40 sqm
Year 2017
Photography: Mercês Tomaz Gomes

In order to continue exploring the interlude between Architecture and woodcraft – In which the Architect builds his own work, I arranged this 40 m2 studio. An opportunity to study / test within this space that would become my Home-Office and set up a laboratory of Architecture, where I could try out both space organization and execution solutions in detail.

The hypothesis of resolving the adjustments, reconsidering badly anticipated decisions, imperfections as a carpenter does with his pieces, with the balance of who projected to solve the inherent deviations of the construction processes, here in a scale of Architecture, a kind of revivalism of the Arts and Crafts movement… To inhabit it, allows me to perceive its result.

The space is divided between a social / work zone and a private one. The colored plane is this border. The work area includes a cooking counter (which can be enclosed with a curtain) and a table for meals / meetings. A cabinet with 3 fronts that solves the storage and complements the kitchen on one side (1), in another a drawer for tools (2) and another for bathroom and cleaning material storage (3). On the axis between windows, the workshop area and (later) I added a desk and another office. This is because in case of use of the workshop the dust can be easily ventilated by the two windows. Going through the colored panel, we reach the private area, with a living room and the room divided by a shelf with use distributed to both sides. At the top of the bed, panels that allow a connection of the two spaces and air circulation.

The “design” is a stipulation of geometric proportions from anthropometric measurements – nothing new, studied for centuries, I simply give it continuation – Colors, is both for not wanting to follow a “minimalistic white” project as well to explore the chromatic range available from the Valchromat material. Until I move from this space, the work will continue. For now there are still things added, but there seems to be less and less needed. It may be that I go through a phase of altering things that worked less well, needing an update but for the time being I have not yet uncovered them, the space is quite comfortable, but it may not survive the continued will to experiment. Nothing that was built interferes with the existing one, everything is made by fittings, without glues or screws and the divisions are “useful” (cabinets, tables, closets…).