House in Melides
This was our first project, to design a vacation house for our parents.
The chosen land-lot is a part of an allotment in the periphery of Melides, a small Alentejo village at the foot of the Grândola mountain ridge. Although its is not located in the old centre of the village, which is the most interesting part, the lot has the advantage of being at the highest ground, allowing faraway sight-seeing over the lagoon valley, heading to the sea.
The first houses to be built around the area anticipated a surrounding of characterless - and therefore unsurprising – architectures. Whether good or bad.
Starting with no other references than these, the design reflects our interest on the odd geometry of the lot, a five-sided irregular polygonal constraint.
The house was thought out as a simple two-storey building which ended up being dismantled into two different halves: one more rational, stable, rigid and regular, and another one, spatially fluid and informal. In the first part are located the reserved areas (bedrooms and bathrooms) distributed by two floors. This is the formal face of the house. The other half holds, in one single floor and in a continuous way, all the areas of the house meant for social interaction (kitchen, dining-room and living-room).
Yet here everything is organized around the patio, "absent-solid space", heart of the house, at the same time closed and open, depending on the observer's position.
The formal relationship between these two halves in not one of confrontation; they rather emerge together, one evolving from the other.
This process is time-anchored, and registered by the choice of five stone marks, enchased in strategic points. The chosen colour spectrum for the exterior of the house enhances even more this aspect. From white (in the beginning) to bluish-grey (in the end), it stresses the transformation process.
This was also an essay project on some themes present in the popular Alentejo architecture, such as the sense of placing the construction against the terrain, the abstraction of the white parallelepiped, the patio and the chimney as a source of light and centre of life.
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