Alternative lifestyle: this remodelling of an old winery suggests some bold new ideas about the nature of space and domestic life

Architectural Review, The, July, 2004 by Catherine Slessor

As land is both plentiful and relatively cheap in Portugal, the standard model for the family house tends to be the low-density villa on a plot. While this might fulfil social aspirations, the result is often incoherent unsustainable developments of over-designed, trophy houses. This dwelling, by the Lisbon-based Aires Mateus brothers, adopts a very different approach, reusing an existing building in a way that imaginatively grafts and integrates a new programme into a historic structure. It also responds to and addresses an urban context and suggests new ideas about interior space and domestic life.

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Aires Mateus' client acquired an ancient winery in the industrial city of Setubal, which lies just south of Lisbon and is Portugal's third largest port. The original structure was a typical response to its industrial/vernacular function--a single, largely imperforate barn-like volume with massive stone walls (nearly a metre thick) and a timber pitched roof. Aires Mateus' remodelling seeks to preserve the formal and material integrity of the old building, while modernizing and rehabilitating it for a different use and a different era.

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The main challenge was to retain a sense of the scale and character of the original structure, while introducing a new set of spaces and elements. This is achieved by the bold and unorthodox expedient of treating the new rooms as an array of self-contained boxes of varying sizes that project out from the external walls into the main communal living space. Each box is supported by a cantilevered steel structure sprung off the massive stone walls, so that the cubic modules seem to float in a slightly disarming way around the soaring double-height space. In practical terms it frees up the ground floor, and though some of the boxes are quite bulky, their (at present) pristine white walls diffuse and disperse light around the interior.

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Access to these floating containers is by means of narrow staircases and walkways slotted in between the boxes and the external walls to create an interstitial circulation zone around the inner edge of the building. On the ground floor, this perimeter zone contains and conceals the kitchen and a bathroom set into the thickness of the external walls.

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The boxes variously accommodate bedrooms, bathrooms and study spaces. Though they appear hermetic volumes from below, each box has a fully glazed wall to take advantage of daylight and views from openings punched into the external envelope. The glass is held in the thinnest of metal frames, the lightness and insubstantiality of these vitrines contrasting with the mass of the original structure and the blind, blank walls of the new insertions. Detailing and materials have an admirably simple honesty of expression--white plaster walls, blond timber floors, clear glass and grey metal window frames. New elements are clearly identifiable and do not compromise the essential dignity of the original building, which has been restored and spruced up with assurance and sensitivity.

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To some extent, the project is almost Japanese, both in its formal rigour and in its re-evaluation of the nature of space, patterns of use and social relationships that make up modern domestic life. It might require a certain discipline (and suitably photogenic furniture) to inhabit the spaces, but challenging architecture has always required adventurous clients. Fundamentally, it is an ingenious response to the challenge of reusing and reinvigorating what would otherwise be neglected building stock, and in doing so offers a provocative alternative model for contemporary domesticity.

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Architect

Aires Mateus, Lisbon

Photographs

Daniel Malhao