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House 05
05
Apartamento Estrela
A nineteenth-century apartment with its plaster ceilings restored and a new kitchen of oak and marble set into the old dining room.
Location
Estrela, Lisbon
Type
Interior renovation
Completed
2024
Area
190 m²
Duration
11 months
Fig. 01 —
Apartamento Estrela
(01)
The house
Good bones, three decades of bad decisions
The apartment had good bones and thirty years of bad decisions: false ceilings over the original stucco, a kitchen squeezed into a corridor, and the best room in the house used for storage. Our client, a cellist, wanted to live and practise here for the rest of her life.
Back to the shell
We took everything back to the shell. The ceilings were restored by the same family of plasterers who look after the city’s palaces, and the pine floorboards were lifted, numbered and relaid. The old dining room became the kitchen — oak cabinetry and a single block of Estremoz marble beneath a ceiling rose from 1891.
The music room faces the river and has acoustic lining hidden behind linen panels. Everything else was kept deliberately quiet: white walls, oak, wool and the light from the tall windows.
Oak, Estremoz marble, pine floorboards, lime plaster, wool
“The budget we agreed in the second month was the budget we paid at the end.”
Clara H., owner
