House in Sobral da Lagoa / Ricardo Bak Gordon

Architects: Ricardo Bak Gordon
Location: Óbidos, Portugal
Project Team: Ana Durão, Luís Pedro Pinto, Walter Perdigão
Project Year: 2008
Project Area: 234 sqm
Photographs: Leonardo Finotti

In a rural vernacular village near Portugal’s west coast, a white volume is filled in the void left between two houses.

The house is located at Sobral da Lagoa a few Km from the newest Óbidos resorts developments. The village is characterized by the white single family houses with their red clay tiled roofed. The plot is defined by the space left between two of these houses, with one side facing the street (where one can access) and the other facing the landscape. The new volume is bounded with the adjacent houses, giving form to the house and releasing the rest of the plot area to the pool and garage.

Plan

The program consisted of a single family house suitable to become a second house for vacations or a permanent house to the one’s seeking the quietude of the rural environment. The two stories white painted plaster volume, is as so, shaped by the neighbor constructions, more linear in entrance façade and enclosing in the façade facing the pool and the outlying fields.

In both cases, it’s the character of the colored window openings engaging with its unique position that animates their composition. Facing the fields, the pool sets the line of the horizon while giving roof to the storage and garage underneath, to which one can arrive from the street below.

Section

On foot, we enter between the two stories, half-way the ground floor social spaces and the upper floor bedrooms. All the spaces are contaminated by both the framed landscape view and the pastel colored filtered light brought inside by the reflections of the painted window shutters. Although the interior finishes point to a more conventional comfort with the wood floor and the white painted walls and ceiling, the outside spaces are quite opposite, searching for fresh and durable materials that give way to the smooth breeze passing by the pool water.