Casa do Pinhal

A one-sentence brief

The brief was one sentence long: a house where the children could walk from their beds to the sand without putting on shoes. The family had spent every August in Comporta for fifteen years and knew the place better than we did — where the afternoon wind comes from, which pines drop resin, how far the dune moves in a winter.

Low, long and open to the pines

We kept the house to a single storey that never rises above the lower branches. The rooms are arranged around three small courtyards, each facing a different hour of the day: breakfast to the east, a shaded patio for lunch, and an evening court where the sun sets through the trunks.

Inside, the palette is the palette of the site: pine boards, lime walls the colour of the sand, reed ceilings that soften the voices of a full house. Deep eaves and sliding timber screens keep the August heat outside, so the house needs no air conditioning at all.