Quinta de Velude
Quinta de Velude is situated on a hillside facing the River Douro and gives its name to Lugar de Veludo, in the parish of São Cristóvão de Nogueira, in the municipality of Cinfães (Viseu).
Abandoned for 40 years, the farm stands out for its extraordinary history and its manor house with a baroque chapel. It also stands out for being part of a series of granite terraces where the cultivation of vines has laid out the territory; it is also surrounded by a series of rural support buildings, such as a beautiful canastro (granary), granite threshing floors, caretakers' houses and a huge number of reservoirs and water pits. Its approximately 7 hectares are full of trees and centuries-old buildings for paths and agricultural support, fig trees, orange trees, oak trees and chestnut trees, but also poplar trees that attest to the existence of several springs and wells whose rehabilitation is noteworthy as they guarantee the property's total self-sufficiency in terms of water supply.
Since the quinta and its manor house remained abandoned, its authenticity was never distorted. It never had the introduction of water and electricity infrastructures or even alterations that stem from these, such as a kitchen or bathrooms. In fact, in its current state, it resembled a Folie more than a dwelling house, since it only had a smokehouse with a marble sink, not a kitchen, and although it had a separate room for a toilet, this was just a bench with a hole that connected directly to the downstairs rooms where the neighbors' cow was still kept. As a result of this abandonment, the farm was also left without any physical links to the Municipal Road 1019 to access Cinfães, built in the 1960s. Since there was no one to claim this access, it became completely isolated and totally forgotten, and its heritage value, which its history alone would justify, has never been identified.
It was only in 2023, when the work was finished, that the President of the Parish Council learned about the origins of this estate, which dates back to the time when D. Afonso Henriques (Portugal's first king) lived in that region with his court-master Egas Moniz (buried nearby in the Paço de Sousa Monastery) and his brother Mem Moniz. In the 14th century, the estate was attributed to the Morgados de Velude as an honor whose original extension would lead to the River Douro. Since then it has belonged to the family and the first known will is that of the noblemen Vasco Esteves de Matos and Madalena Gil, the founders of the Chapel of Santo António (1388) which is the origin of the Parish Church of São João Batista (in Cinfães) which was rehabilitated in the 18th century and includes the tombs of Vasco and Madalena in its transept.
The Casa de Velude attests to its considerable cultural and heritage value, combined with the discreet beauty of its baroque chapel and the ancestral system of its particular sequential distribution of rooms. It is therefore considered that this renovation addresses not only pressing environmental and sustainability issues, but also promotes the activation of the Quinta's unknown historical memory and its close relationship with the region's origins, demystifying, in a convergent way, the debate on the aforementioned notions.
It is inevitable that as the global climate and biodiversity crisis deepens and we face the challenge of providing dignified and sustainable solutions, architecture will share this concern. This intervention simultaneously offers an example of responsibility and creates an opportunity for this debate. In a climate of growing populism, the aim is to show that local culture and traditions offer lessons that can be used to find progress-oriented solutions rooted in the past. And that, without falling into the trap of nostalgia or pastiche, we can reinvent our identity by looking at global issues with a critical and forward-looking approach, as well as local knowledge from which we can all learn.
Recognizing the extraordinary value of this house, Prof. Aníbal Costa was commissioned to carry out an inspection and diagnostic study. This study - of great depth and rigor - was crucial for defining the rehabilitation and intervention strategy.
This seeks to introduce 21st century comfort requirements while remaining absolutely faithful to traditional values - both in its original enfilade spatiality which, due to the aforementioned abandonment, has never been distorted and is, according to Prof. Aníbal Costa, a very rare example in the country - and in the use of materials and colors. In his report we read: “The Casa de Velude has a cultural and heritage value yet to be written about and researched, beyond the discreet beauty of its Chapel, the beautiful altar and the House that still includes the very old system of internal organization of spaces, in which there was no distribution corridor and the rooms were sequential, as character spaces with greater interaction with people outside the family. An internal organization that was not just about social relations, but also about balancing the temperature and humidity inside the house, in other words, the comfort of the interior, both for heating and cooling, and where natural ventilation was an obligatory complement. In this sense, an architectural solution that takes advantage of maintaining this old feature of the house, which proves its antiquity, will contribute to maintaining its reading as a historical record.” The Douro green in the oil paintings of the interiors, the reds and ochres in the doors and windows - with their new brown wood, also painted in oil - or the blues of the iron oxide pigments. All these original elements are combined with contemporaneity, revealing material and immaterial values in a dialog between new and old, between tradition and modernity.
The project aimed to restore the existing house, transforming it into a living, social and leisure space. The existing elevations and heights of the façades were maintained and, while honoring the existing morphology, the interior spaces were filled with new environments, adapted to current housing conditions and requirements.
The spatial fluidity promoted by the remarkable door and window openings guarantees natural lighting and ventilation, revealing the ancestral wisdom of taking advantage of natural resources, and only one central heating system was introduced, carefully chosen so as not to distort the spaces. The electrical installation was inserted outside the walls using certified cables, but routed through natural-colored linen, and the equipment is made of porcelain. The rest of the infrastructure is concentrated in the ceilings of both floors; on the upper floor it was installed in the roof cavity with strategic drops so as not to damage the wooden ceilings and on the lower floor, in the ceiling, with occasional rises so as not to damage the centuries-old floors. The rest were installed at the base of the new floor.
The smokehouse was fully restored and a fireplace was added with a piece designed in brass for the purpose; in a joint redesign of this room's original door to the outside, a fridge and technical cabinets were integrated to support the island that serves the cooking area.
In the room that used to serve as the toilet, a staircase was introduced to provide an interior physical connection between the two floors. In the adjacent room, a delicate screen was designed to give privacy to the new bathroom with a bathtub and a shower that takes advantage of the window and part of the space of the aforementioned toilet. Both elements can be easily removed, allowing the room to be returned to its original state.
The lower level rooms, where the animals and farm implements used to be, were renovated with detailed carpentry elements, introducing comfort without questioning the character of the spaces that reveal their origin. Other structural elements (such as beams and pillars) were introduced occasionally, using and recycling some chestnut trees that were dry on the farm, but whose trunks offered the necessary stability. Likewise, all the window frames were designed reinterpreting the local tradition, also made from chestnut finished with oil paint, as on the upper floor.
This lower floor, in keeping with local tradition, leans against the retaining wall and therefore has only one front, so in order to guarantee the natural health necessary for the floor to become habitable, cross-ventilation was introduced using the lower level below it (a lower level of land defined by a granite wall) and a new raised slab which, in an absolutely discreet way, guarantees natural air circulation.
The constant breeze and the murmur of the trees abound in the house. And the sun, which travels from east to west, first bathes the house on the granite terrace that was built as a kitchen esplanade, entirely made from recycled granite taken from the downstairs rooms and, if the heat is too much in summer, it is mitigated by the coolness of the granite tanks made from the wine press, also taken from the downstairs rooms, where there are now two suites and two living rooms.
There is an unexpected coolness in the hot summers of the Douro Interior. In winter, the central heating and the elegance we have sought with the design of the new interventions, where the warmth of the wood abounds, guarantee comfort and well-being.
The pool was made entirely from recycled granite from a water reservoir whose water source has dried up, articulating the comfort of technology in symbiosis with the huge pieces that were dismantled, identified and reassembled; in its unique cut joints, we can see the ancestral knowledge of stonework and, in the tension between these two logics, we find the paradigm of the relationship between the past and the present.
