Built in Ponte de Lima (northwest Portugal) in a very green rural setting, it deals with a tough geography (on a slope facing north) and an unforgiving geology (built on a solid granite hill).
Being so, its design is focused on flowing with the slope, disguising the fact that it is built in 3 levels, with minimal excavation, and maximizing the building’s relationship with the sun and the views.
The ground floor provides vast parking space and a laundry.
Over the garage, at the entrance floor, the main social spaces (circulations, kitchen, dinning and living room) are unified and generously dimensioned, calmly supervised from the owner’s home office. This floor opens expansively to the first level garden and to the northern far-fetching landscape.
At the top floor the rooms and designed in a stricter fashion: this house is conceived to be lived by the family as a community so these choices were quite conscious. All the rooms open, individually, to the top level garden. There’s a master suite (with dressing room and private wc), a couple of sibling’s rooms (united -or divided- by a moving panel), a guest room and, at a leading position relating to both the garden (though in a different, more distant, way than the rooms) and a big terrace opening over the flourishing landscape.
Summing it up, this is a project that tries to both relate and stand up to its location while giving this family comfortable but vast spaces to be lived in family and to entertain in big numbers.
source: tiagodovale.com
