Lilac by Bureau: 44 Square Metres, One Counter and Two Domestic Worlds.

How many square metres does a home actually need? Bureau has been poking at that question for a while. We first wrote about the practice of Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta and Galliane Zamarbide in 2021, when Rua Maria, a Lisbon family flat the studio modestly called “just an apartment”, turned out to be a good deal more. Since then we’ve followed them into a pastel float spa and a former dental practice in Geneva. Lilac brings them back to Lisbon and down to 44 square metres.

The flat is one half of a pair. Bureau calls them the “brothers/sisters”, Lilac and Blue: the first homes owned by two siblings. Lilac, the smaller of the two, was completed in June 2026 as a refurbishment with furniture designed by the studio. Pimenta’s written statement opens with the question at the heart of the project: “How many square metres are needed to accommodate daily gestures and rituals, objects and habits?”

Democratising the Family Home: Rua Maria Apartment in Lisbon by Bureau.

Rua Maria is a truly evolved dwelling that defies expectations. Bureau describe it as “just an apartment”, although it’s a lot more than that.

Bureau’s answer starts by refusing to treat movement as wasted floor area. “The new layout of the flat transforms circulation into space, and space into circulation,” Pimenta writes. The old entrance hall is now the kitchen. The interior bedroom at the centre of the plan has become the wet zone. Around that core runs a continuous passage with four symmetrical openings, reopening paths of light that earlier alterations had shut off. The existing structural walls stay exactly where they were, and the loop simply gets more out of them.

Then there’s the counter, and this is where we got hooked. A single worktop passes through the central core, serving the kitchen on one side and the bathroom on the other. Someone rinsing a bowl and someone brushing their teeth now share a bench, and a line of sight. Pimenta describes the move as “bringing together two domestic worlds that are usually hidden from one another.” It sounds faintly outrageous on paper. In Francisco Nogueira’s photographs, it looks like the most sensible thing in the world.

In Favour of Flux: Maison Molaire in Geneva by Bureau.

In an almost vaudevillian series of spatial acts, Maison Molaire becomes the perfect backdrop for ‘the flux of human life’.

Colour carries the rest. Lilac-toned tiles wrap the walls and ceiling, the joinery follows in the same soft hue, and a pale timber frame holds ribbed translucent panels above the bench. Every new opening is made from translucent or mirrored material, so rooms this tight borrow depth from each other instead of closing in.

The studio cites Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris, in which the apartment behaves as much like a character as the people living in it. The reference holds up. Lilac is planned as a series of scenes (cooking, bathing, talking, retreating), each with its own degree of privacy and none of them fully sealed off.

What we like most is that nobody here is apologising for the size. “Flexibility lies in the imagined ways of life; specificity is what gives form to every attribute, to every domestic ritual,” Pimenta writes. At 44 square metres, the size is the whole point of the brief, and Bureau treats it that way.

Casa do Monte in Lisbon by Leopold Banchini Architects and Daniel Zamarbide.

A spiral staircase made of thin blue steel winds through each level of Casa do Monte house in Lisbon, culminating at the rooftop terrace.

[Images courtesy of Bureau. Photography by Francisco Nogueira.]