Burnished Aluminum Sheeting Covers the Entire Ground Floor of This Renovated 1893 Lisbon Home

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Project Details:

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Architect: Extrastudio / @extrastudio

Footprint: 2,701 square feet

Builder: Vassalo & Sousa

Structural Engineer: Pedro Viegas

Civil Engineer: Blueorizon

Landscape Design: Oficina dos Jardins

Photographer: Mikael Olsson

From the Architect: "This project is the first in a series of three residences we named Casas Poveras. Shaped in a time of uncertainty, these houses were stripped down to the essentials, acquiring an unexpected, raw, and intense character. Once a landscape of estates and farmland, Marvila became Lisbon's main industrial district in the 20th century. Bounded by the Tagus River and its railway lines, the area is defined by a distinct typology of warehouses for industries reflected in street names like Rua do Açúcar and Rua da Fábrica do Material de Guerra. After decades of neglect, these same warehouses are now repopulated with studios and galleries, making Marvila the city's most vibrant creative district today.

"The project renovates and extends a single-story house built in 1893, fully preserving the existing structure. The existing house was treated as an artifact, its features retained. The new extension alters only the exterior form and a side passage that provides access to the garden. Likewise, architectural elements from the existing facades were removed, restored, and incorporated into the new facades. Old and new were finished in the same way. The different time periods are legible only in the building’s silhouette and the texture of materials. Our clients had two requests for the house: a generous, open, loft-like character and a garage to be seamlessly integrated into the living room, so that it would be possible to work on cars or motorbikes without being separated from the family’s daily life.

"Two gestures define the house. A full-width cut to the front, facing the street, creates a two-story high courtyard, providing shade and privacy for the bedrooms, and, as a counterpart, a triple-height interior space faces the garden, revealing the building’s full vertical scale. Despite the lack of grandeur of the existing house, the project embraces its modesty and imperfections as a register of the past that might otherwise have been lost.

"Punctuated by windows, the back facade is cut at one corner by a vertical strip of light, the result of a legal constraint we chose to embrace, which slices the back facade diagonally. As in Utzon’s Can Lis, for a few minutes at the end of the day, a ray of light slowly enters the space and revolves around enigmatically. Once the design concept was defined, all decisions concerning finishes, textures, and colors were intentionally left open to be made on site with the craftsmen and clients. Their knowledge and decisions were made visible, giving the building a handmade and tactile expression—both rough and refined. Serendipity allowed us to cover the entire ground floor with aluminum sheeting, which was hand-brushed to perfection by one of the craftsmen. Its surface resembles leather: natural, soft, and luminous.

 "The inside walls were left bare, covered only with a gray plaster scratch coat, Jannis Kounelli’s color of our time. We discovered this gray plaster on-site, an economical solution that unified all the elements, while also discreetly linking the house to Marvila’s past. Ultramarine blue, a historical, artificial color that defines the house, was found in the existing building. A pigmented lime plaster unifies the entire volume. Blue being an unstable pigment, each facade had to be finished in a single day, without seams or repairs, a Sisyphean act. This blue layer gives the house an ambiguous appearance, more old than new, yet used in a way that anchors it to the present."