ARX

The house is located in a "typical" suburban development in the parish of Pousos. Set on high ground, it forms a kind of viewpoint, with a panoramic view over Leiria.

To ensure greater openness and access to the panoramic view, the owners bought the three front-row plots overlooking the "cliff".

Although each plot allowed for the construction of a basement plus two storeys, combining them opened up the possibility of building a lower house that would "embrace" portions of garden.

When we first visited the site, the surrounding roads were already complete. Owing to the earthworks carried out to build the streets, the ground rose abruptly from the edge of the pavement, like an evocative construction of a topographical nature. Around it, the neighbours' houses had been built in an "L" shape enclosing the site.

The design of the house arises directly from the way we observed this reality. As it was a large house by local standards, we chose to divide the built volume into two parts: one, the buried construction, conceived as a negative in the ground and understood as part of it; the other, the resting construction, a long, flat volume in white exposed concrete.

The lower volume houses the technical and support areas, as well as those used more occasionally. In the upper volume, the social areas are grouped around the main patio, and the bedrooms around a second, private patio.

The main particularity of this house lies in the dialectic between its "natural" underground half and its raised, "artificial" upper half; between its introverted, intimate face of half-light or reflected light, and its open, permeable and luminous face, from which it becomes possible to look out to the distant horizon.

We sought to understand the life and temperament of those who came to us to design a house, and to try to give new meaning to their everyday lives.