Casa Sanavi
Location
Foz do Douro, Porto
Year
2024
Area
420 m²
Client
Private client
Status
Completed
(01) Overview
A concrete house for a family of four, organised around a single stair that the morning sun crosses like the hand of a clock.
The site is a narrow plot two streets back from the Atlantic, hemmed in by four-storey neighbours. Rather than fight for views, the house turns inward to a courtyard and lets one long skylight do the work of a dozen windows.
One stair, one light
Every room is reached from the central stair. Its board-marked walls were poured in a single day, so the grain of the pine formwork runs unbroken from the cellar to the roof terrace. At 10:42 on the autumn equinox, the sun lines up exactly with the treads.
Upstairs, the bedrooms are deliberately small. Their ceilings step up towards the courtyard, so light reaches deeper into the plan than the floor area suggests.
Materials
Exposed concrete, Lioz limestone floors, oiled oak joinery and lime render. Nothing is painted. The palette was chosen so the house would age into the same grey as the granite walls of the old quarter.
(02) More work
