Casa Costa Cabral

Project name : Casa Costa Cabral
Type of project: Refurbishment and extension
Location: Porto, Portugal
Project area: 311m2
Collaborators: Gabriel José Maria Ferro, Pablo Hernández Esteban , Radka Stastna, Karin Kotkova, Nikola Gronychova,Takafumi Soma
Photographers: Attilio Fiumarella, Bruno Miguel Ribeiro, Antonio Chaves

The Casa na Rua de Costa Cabral 944 is a single-familiy house located in the center of the city of Porto (Portugal, Western Europe). It resulted by the extention and restoration of a 1870s building whose structure is made by solid granite stone.
Porto is a windy city facing the Atlantic Ocean, whose sunlight is bright and white. Air is clean, and comparatively low polluted, thanks to the Atlantic Ocean influence. Part of Porto city center is classified by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, due to its traditonal architecture. Porto can be considered one of the world capitals of contemporary architecture, being the homeland of two Pritzker Prize winners.
Description of the project: the kitchen.
This project is located in a long and narrow land plot. The ground floor area is extended beyond the standard fachade alignment. The extended area hosts the kitchen and encloses a pátio. A tall narrow vertical window in the kitchen permits eye contact within the main three spaces of the house: the kitchen, the living room and the main suite room.
The living room. It receives natural ilumination through the pátio that reflected by the walls gets uniform, creating optimal conditions for its purpouse: relaxation and reading.
The suite room. An horizontal window through the whole lenght of the room permits uniform ilumination and a pleasant view of the garden. Moreover the shape of this opening facilitates darkening.
The daughter and son’s rooms. Oriented North-west, they are confronted by the busy Rua Costa Cabral. We adopted a feature that reduces the acustic flow increasing the scarce natural lighting: it has been to slide the surface of the openings up, bending them to the sky. We did obtain a view of the blue that plases the youngster while they use this space to study.
This last feature did permit to provide proportions to the main elevation of the building that respect the pre-existent 1870s building fachade.