Monte das Oliveiras

Cool without machines

The site is an old olive grove outside Évora, where summer afternoons reach forty degrees and the light is hard enough to bleach a photograph. Our clients, a couple returning to Portugal after thirty years in London, asked for a house that would stay cool without machines.

Built from its own ground

The answer was in the ground. The walls are rammed earth made from the soil excavated for the foundations — half a metre thick, warm in January and cool in August. The rooms gather around a shaded courtyard, and arcades on the south side keep the sun off the glass.

Not a single olive tree was felled. The house steps around them, and every bedroom looks into the branches. Terracotta floors, cork ceilings and lime walls complete a house made, almost entirely, of its own landscape.