A white house of stacked volumes among pines

Residential · Comporta, Portugal · 2019

Casa Alba

White walls, one tree, the Atlantic.

Overview

Casa Alba is a family retreat arranged around a courtyard and a two-hundred-year-old umbrella pine. The house is one storey of lime-washed walls, opened up wherever the light is best.

Its stairs, benches and shelves are carved from the same white mass, so the interior reads as a single sculpted surface.

Location: Comporta, Portugal
Year: 2019
Status: Completed
Typology: Residential
Coordinates: 38.3806° N, 8.7846° W

Gallery

A closer look.

Three images. Select any one to see it full screen.

Drawings

Drawn to be built.

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

The ground floor, set out on a 6 × 5 m structural grid.24 × 15 m · 4 rooms · 360 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.

Honed Travertine
Selected in blocks at the quarry, honed and never polished. It warms in the sun and stays cool underfoot.
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.