Hill Home in Gateira near vineyards, pines and olive trees by Camarim Arquitectos

Architects: Camarim Arquitectos
Location: Gateira, Portugal
Year: 2014
Area: 4,338 ft²/ 403 m²
Photo courtesy: Nelson Garrido
Description:

Gateira is a village set on a wonderful slope planted with vineyards, pines and olive trees with impressive perspectives over the southern tip of Serra da Estrela, the most noteworthy point in terrain Portugal.

The customers – a British couple – needed a second home to give them space, outside and quiet, as opposed to their life in London. The main inquiry: how to plan on such a sensational scene, with an unordinary equalization between nature, agribusiness and conventional engineering? Our procedure was to meddle as meager as could be allowed: one goes into the house in the upper part of the plot, through a divider that inspires the district’s customary slate structures, and plummets onto the house’s center – a social space split in 2 levels.

From this space, the house’s volume breaks and reaches out along the geology in an unobtrusive yet powerful partition in the middle of social and private i.e. each space sits on an alternate level and has direct access to the outside. We might say that rather than a house in the scene we thought about a house from the scene, as if building a stroll in the wide open.

Past the sentimental idea of an all around grounded house, broad contact with the ground gives huge vitality advantages: we utilize the world’s perpetual warm mass to adjust air warm amplitudes for the duration of the day and seasons. The yard between the front room and the main room is likewise a latent warm gadget: it makes a warm differential between the swimming pool and the porch, which produces a climbing wind stream over the house for cooling in spring and summer, and it permits concentrated protection of the most deepest point in the house in harvest time and winter.