This story begins with an old rose building on the riverside avenue of Vila Real de Santo António, a city located in the south of Portugal. The rose-house had a nice and rational facade, but the real treasure was inside. An exotic interior with details such as a mermaid painting in the ceiling of a bathroom, a multitude of patterned mosaics, detailed wooden doors and a big stone sink.
It was obvious from the beginning for the architectural team that should keep and emphasize the exotic interior. The program asked for the transformation of the layout from a single house to a five apartments building and gave them the perfect reason to create five different environments that play with site-specific idiosyncrasies of each space. A selection of colors and materials, combined with extensive architecture details preservation and the introduction of new contemporary elements, allowed them to create five flats with distinctive personalities, where each one is contributing to a general set that pays homage to the exotic qualities that they found in the original building.
Architecture: Aurora Architects + Furo
Photography: do mal o menos
About
Aurora Arquitectos studio was founded in the year 2010 by Sofia Couto and Sérgio Antunes and is the natural consequence of the work they have been carrying out together, as well as the experience and legacy of studio Kaputt!. The subject of their work has been buildings in their most varied scales, from small dwellings to large cultural infrastructures, as well as urban master plans. Both members are trained architects, but based on the discipline’s method they have carried out projects in various areas on architecture’s outer edges.
