Camões House / Pedro Ferreira Architecture Studio

Architects: Pedro Ferreira Architecture Studio
Location: Porto, Portugal
Lead Architects: Pedro Vasco Ferreira
Area: 206.0 m2
Project Year: 2017
Photographs: João Morgado

Engineering : ASL & Associados
Builder: Axisarte
Styling: Rute Moreda
Client: Giraffe Dream

Text description provided by the architects. The Camões Street building introduces a paradigm shift in studio practice. For the first time we are challenged to go beyond the architectural design and embrace the furniture and decoration project.

The building, an Art Deco-inspired house built in the second decade of the 20th century with a completely different spatial organization of the typical Porto house, was intended to become an integrated unit of tourism exploration composed of four small one-bedroom apartments, only.

The solution maintains the original plan with a lateral staircase and creates four apartments, where once the different valences of the house worked.

Contrary to previous projects, the exercise here was not to define boundaries between the present and the past, but rather by the search and reinterpretation of contemporary formal and spatial solutions of the original construction of the house.

We design hierarchical spaces, visually distinguishing the different parts of the program of each apartment, kitchen, living room, dining room, bedroom, escaping simultaneously to the compartmentalization and temptation of “open space”.