Responsible architects Arq. Diogo Madeira, Arq. Rodrigo Sequeira Dias
Location Ponta Delgada, Açores, Portugal
Year of project completion 2021
Total built area 356,50m²
Photography Paulo Goulart e do Sequeira Dias arquitetos
Construction company Porta-R Lda, Furnas e Companhia
Engineering Eng,Ricardo Côrte-Real Pacheco, Eng. Renato Leça
Client Private
Our goal was to build a house that would respond to the plan defined by the clients and would adjust to the natural topography of the land, which presents a steady incline on the northern slope of the island of São Miguel. We wanted to create a building that interfered as little as possible with the existing morphology. The practice of architecture is always difficult because it needs to violate nature without destroying it.
Beauty arises precisely between the balance between the artificial (built structure) and the natural. Therefore, we chose to create a single-storey house with a basement, making it possible to create a composition of platforms that reproduce the terraces of the hillside. The horizontal design, which is developed on the crossroads of two volumes, the ground floor and the basement, follows the natural slope of the land to the sea. This symbiosis with nature favours architecture, since it takes advantage of the rural characteristics of the land and the view over the sea. The implantation of the house is in the first third of the land was in order to ensure a reasonable distance from the public road and away from the limit of the maritime public domain.
The ground floor houses the intimate living and leisure spaces and the basement houses the predominantly technical spaces. Above the suites and the large 80 m2 living room is an open terrace with a swimming pool that, through the visual effect of a vanishing point, seems to embrace the sea.
Also envisaged was the specific recovery of the existing boundary walls made of dry basalt stone laid by hand, which as a whole gives the terrain its predominantly rural characteristics. Finally, it was decided to use concrete and white (understood as a neutral colour) in order to bring the house closer to the tones of the dark basaltic rocks or the white foam of the sea waves on the north slope.
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