House in Gerês by Graça Correia & Roberto Ragazzi // Portugal.

I first saw this house published quite a while ago but it’s one of those projects that got under my skin, and is probably worth dusting off and looking at afresh.

It’s a house in northern Portugal, by Graça Correia & Roberto Ragazzi. I remember reading at the time that both had worked for Eduardo Souto de Moura (lucky ducks) and with such illustrious professional lineage can we but wonder that this house is so super. The photographs are by a few people, namely Alberto Placido, Juan Rodrigues, and Luis Ferreira Alves.

Conceived of as a long concrete box jutting thrillingly out over a drop down to the river, the house is a simple concept with terrific structural engineering.

This is the sort of house I look at and start mentally arranging my own furniture in.

The brutal (architecture-speak, not ASBO) exterior is softened inside by extensive (not expensive) timber lining to the walls and ceiling. The floors are left a nicely polished concrete. The rooms aren’t huge (bonus points Portugal – I think here in Australia we build far too largely) and the precipitous nature of the site means that the living spaces are up in the canopy of the trees. Glorious.

The windows are great big plates of glass, fuss-free and just right for the job. The rough stone steps leading to the front door are, in my view, wonderful. Especially contrasted with the sharp concrete and glass box jutting jauntily outwards at the top of the hill.

Sigh. Time to stop shunting our sofa around (it would work – it would really work) and get back to real life. What a great house to daydream in.

Ende.

Text by Luke Moloney for Yellowtrace.

[Photography by Alberto Placido, Juan Rodrigues, Luis Ferreira Alves, NG photo & Fernando Alda, courtesy of Correia/Ragazzi.]