A timber canopy roof floating over a planted terrace and a garden pool

Residential · Lagos, Portugal · 2025

The Canopy House

One roof, and a garden underneath it.

Overview

The Canopy House is one gesture: a long, folded roof of larch that floats over the whole plan and reaches out to shade the terrace. Its upper planes are planted, so from the hill above the house reads as garden.

Beneath it, the rooms are simple boxes of white stone and timber screens, set back from the edge so the canopy does the work of walls. In summer the house is open on every side.

Location: Lagos, Portugal
Year: 2025
Status: Completed
Typology: Residential
Coordinates: 37.1028° N, 8.6742° W

We gave the house one roof and let the garden have the rest.

Halden & Voss

Drawings

Drawn to be built.

Plan, section and elevation, from the entry to the terrace, each drawn to scale on the structural grid.

The ground floor, set out on a 6 × 5 m structural grid.30 × 15 m · 5 rooms · 450 m² ground floor

Materials

Made of few things.

Three materials, chosen at the source and left to age. Nothing is painted to look like something else.

Charred Oak
Scorched the old Japanese way, oiled, then left alone. The char is the weatherproofing, and it deepens with every winter.
Low-iron Glass
Without the green cast of ordinary glass, so the landscape reads true from edge to edge.
Fair-faced Concrete
Cast once, in timber formwork we draw ourselves. The tie holes stay: they are how you read the pour.