In a house nestled in a labyrinth — the bucolic neighbourhood of a small village, sinuous and organic, teeming with green — the firm REDO architects has created a study in contrasts, one that echoes the uniqueness of these surroundings. Everything in this village near Colares (in Sintra, Portugal, just outside of Lisbon) is on a small scale, even if the views — street-corner glimpses of the Atlantic Ocean, blue and vigorous — hint at vastness. The home itself speaks of both the intimate and the grand. It belongs to the third and fourth generations of the family that gave the Puppeteers neighbourhood its name. As the family tells it, the patriarch was a puppet-maker who fell in love with a woman here and decided to stay.

The project model shows how, conceptually, the interior and exterior skins relate to one another.

REDO redesigned the property between 2018 and 2021, taking on a renovation of two houses with a shared courtyard — a total of 215 square metres built in a style typical of the area, with peaked, terracotta-tiled roofs and white plaster-finished stone walls. One of the volumes (home to the client’s son, great-grandson of the original puppeteer) is taller than the other; the main volume, temporarily being rented out, is connected to it by a capsule-shaped patio. To begin, the architects gutted the interior and rebuilt the ceilings according to the original architecture, replacing old beams with new ones in the same pine wood, before injecting it with a modern twist.

A capsule-shaped courtyard connects the house’s two volumes, similar in architectural style to other houses in the area.

“We kept only the external walls from both houses and reinvented the interior layout, using the history of the place and the puppeteers’ stage-set construction as the central theme,” explains Diogo Figueiredo, principal and founder of REDO architects, who collaborated on the project with Pedro França Jorge, of the same firm. After all, this is a house meant to be like a private theatre divided into various performative modules inserted into the pre-existing structure. “The puppets’ scenes are inside-out spaces devised for a specific performance; we made an analogy between creating such scenes with making spaces for the new living activities. This strategy allowed us to imbue each room with a unique character, giving each moment of daily life a specific stage — for reading, cooking, sitting, studying, sleeping, gardening and so on.”

Recalling a ship’s porthole, the bedroom’s round window has an internal sliding wooden shutter that allows for total blackout.

The two-storey volume’s sculptural central stair is also multifunctional: it doubles as storage and conceals a wine rack.

The spaces are defined by the white gypsum surfaces that are layered over, and then peeled away from, the pre-existing architecture. Their rounded edges — the motif of a precise quarter-circle that comes through in the sculpted ceilings and is echoed in the outlines of the Lioz limestone floors — underscore the sense that they have been slotted into the volumes. The new walls, ceiling and flooring were in fact considered one geometry, exploring the “plasticity and fluidity of lightweight construction,” Figueiredo explains. The novel geometry both inspires a dual reading of the interior and dramatizes the relationship between the interior and exterior “skins,” as he calls them, creating a “friction that generates misalignments.” These intentional misalignments are given expression in the interior’s wooden cladding, where the white surfaces meet the pre-existing walls, which include the window and door frames and the “interstices” containing built-ins, bathrooms and other “back-of-stage” spaces.

The main motif throughout is a quarter-circle, which here delineates the stone flooring and defines the upper wall.

Appearing as an object in the double-storey house, the staircase in particular speaks to the special attention given to built-in furniture. “These elements have a key role in connecting the main rooms by defining openings and tearing parts of the walls to allow a fluid circulation,” explains Figueiredo. “The shelves, wardrobes, window bench, beds, bedside tables and stairs are considered part of the ‘performance’ from the stage-set and were deeply customized to their specific purpose and location in the house.” He explains that each joinery detail, including the staircase’s barely-perceptible semicircular door that conceals a wine rack, was intensively discussed with the local carpenter, “aiming to extend the concept of the project to the smallest detail.” The overall effect is solid and meaningful, as was the aim: “This house reflects our ambition to reinvent and imagine the future,” Figueiredo says, “while respecting the past and the present.”