One storey, the height of two

The project

A studio house in the Arrábida natural park: the existing two floors become a single storey of double height, inside the same gable. A preliminary planning application.

What we were responsible for

A house inside the Arrábida natural park, an alteration to an existing building: it had two floors and becomes a single storey of double height. The gable stays because the gable is what the place is made of; what changes is that the floor between the two levels comes out, leaving one room the full height of the roof — kitchen, sleeping and living in the same volume, which is what a studio house is. The outbuildings to the south are kept as they stand. The survey was made from a point cloud, so the drawings sit on the building as measured rather than on the building as remembered.

Who built it

WALLNUT was responsible for the design. No construction contract has been awarded — and the work can go to site with us, under a single contract.

What this does not include

The client is not named and neither is the street. This is a preliminary planning application inside a protected landscape; nothing is licensed and nothing is built. The proposal is a single storey: the volume reads as two levels because the building being altered had two, and that reading is deliberate — it is not a second floor. The images are renders and diagrams of the scheme.

Verified facts

Storeys in the proposal
1 of double height
Storeys in the existing building
2 the floor between them comes out
Dwelling type
T0 a studio house: kitchen, sleeping, living and bathroom
Outbuildings to the south
— kept as they stand
The existing building was surveyed by
— point cloud, so the drawings sit on the building as measured and not as remembered
What the natural park allows
— alteration of what is there, not a new building — which is why the outline is kept

Images

The house at dusk from the approach: a white rendered gable volume with a timber-clad base, standing at the end of a gravel track with the older single-storey outbuildings running away to the right. — One storey, the height of two. The gable is the one thing that does not change.

The entrance side: a tall opening cut into the white gable wall with a single window above it, figures walking on the gravel and the outbuildings continuing along the right. — Two openings on this face, and the upper one lights the same single room.

The timber-clad flank seen along the track, vertical boarding running the full height of the gable, with the tiled roofs of the outbuildings low against the hillside beyond. — The outbuildings stay as they are. Nothing here pretends they are new.

A line axonometric of the existing building: a simple gabled volume with a dashed line marking the floor that divides it into two levels. — What is there. The dashed line is the floor that comes out.

The same volume drawn split horizontally, the roof half lifted clear of the base with arrows showing the separation. — The operation, in one drawing: open it up and keep the outline.

A block diagram of the finished arrangement: a large pale volume with two smaller dark volumes pushed into it from the sides, arrows marking the direction of entry. — What goes back in: the served pieces, pushed into a single room.

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