Eduardo Souto de Moura

After the Baião House experience, I felt that in Portugal, it would be more natural to design wooden frames. To this end, the roof has to be exposed to view, declaring itself a new object, visible as if fallen from the sky. The project set out to redesign an earlier house due to the analogies of the site, the brief and the materials. One exception, one aspect that was not a redesign, was that we had to reconstruct the hillside with new retaining walls and platforms, which cost more than the house itself. “Le coeur a des raisons…”

The client, an intelligent man, agreed, and for seven years the house gradually gained its independence, passing from the redesign to the specific design for the occupants and the site which we progressively discovered and modified.