Architects: Pedro Ferreira Architecture Studio
Project: Casa dos Patios
Location: Porto, Portugal
Year 2017
Photographer: João Morgado
Casa dos Patios project aimed to refurbish an eighteenth-century urban villa, located in one of the most charismatic streets of the city center, featured by a mixture of commerce, services and housing uses.
The building which had had throughout its existence diverse uses, such as services, housing, and even worked as a school, had been abandoned and in a state of pre-ruin for decades.
The project sought to create a set of apartments and shops, keeping all the structure and spatial concept of the preexistence.
Although from the outside the building appeared to have only two floors, it actually contained a curious organization that takes shape in four habitable floors.
In spite of the advanced state of degradation, the baroque organization still evident in the interior, namely in the existing stone stairs, served as a starting point for the definition of the project.
A simple and strict organization, where spaces are strongly illuminated and marked by the remaining elements of the original spaces: the arcs between divisions, granite masonry, carpentry elements and stairs.
The most affirmative moment of the project is the common stairway access to the second floor, since it is new. The need to create this element and the impossibility of diluting it in the whole, led us to assume it, giving it a geometric and contemporary reading, combined with an absolutely baroque color.
The result are eleven apartments of typology t0, t1 and t2, where the white walls and ceilings contrast with the warmth of the pine floors and the dry gray of the carpentry.
The interior space creates a peaceful dialogue between the past and the present, reflected in contained and elegant spaces, enriched by the sunlight variation.
