Castelão
On a serene plot, a house reconnects with its place through its own transformation.
It was a two-story house, stacked and closed in on itself, that decided to become a single-story house. The transformation began with subtraction: the upper volume was demolished, and the existing stone structures were preserved — silent foundations of a new narrative.
The new house rests on a single level, embracing the topography with humility and lightness, as if it wished to disappear into the landscape. Designed as a weekend retreat, it is stripped of artifices and faithful to the essence of inhabiting.
Analog, simple, direct. Without intrusive technologies or excessive equipment — just shelter, shade, and time. The gabled roof, now clad in black tiles, rests on the structure with the serenity of something that knows its place. The slopes are not limited to external expression — they extend over each room, following the space as ceilings that never forget they are roofs.
The gesture is unique: a single, continuous floor that covers and connects all rooms. The construction uses local methods: walls plastered with the “tyrolean” technique, a visible and pronounced wooden structure, as if it were a tent anchored to the ground. The house does not impose itself — it clings to the earth, discreet, firm, rooted.
Two porches, facing east and west, extend the house outward, creating habitable transitions between interior and landscape, shadow and light. These are generous gestures that stretch the act of living toward the climate and the land.
Inside, a corridor winds its way along the building. Slightly disproportionate, almost silent, it separates but also stitches the spaces together — evoking the distant memory of a rural hotel. A continuous gesture that defines the rhythm of the house, where to inhabit is also to walk, to see, to pause.
More than a house, it is a reconciliation with the place.
A light shelter built upon the bones of a former presence — a permanent pause that chose restraint as a form of permanence.
