Beyond the river at Veade in northern Portugal, Parto Atelier sets Casa de Souvinha behind thick walls of rammed earth, three buildings pushed down a slope held by oaks and cork oaks.
Beyond the river the land opens over fields and valleys to the east, with Senhora da Graça sitting on the horizon. Oaks and cork oaks had already taken the plot, so rather than clear them Parto Atelier pushed the house further down the slopes, where the topography surrounds it and protects it. The site made the decision before the drawing did.
The approach gives little away. Closer to the watercourse the path between plots begins to fade, and through the trees the arrival is announced by thick walls of rammed earth, embedded in the landscape and dissolved in the vegetation. Earth compacted in layers is an old way to build and a slow one, and here it does the work of a boundary rather than of a facade.
A long granite imprint crosses the accentuated topography, guiding the path toward an entrance sheltered to the west. From there the construction is cast by the slope. It follows the natural morphology of the ground and shapes, from the outside in, a gradient of privacy across different levels, so that the deeper into the house one moves the higher the ground has risen around it.
Further south the kitchen and a large dining table take the other views, looking over an open plateau and following the sun's path through the day. At the centre of the living room the fire holds the space, framing the landscape as a painting and making a case for sitting still.
At its tail a slight rise anticipates the bedrooms, whose twist reaches for the sunrise and the surrounding landscape. Inside, the atmosphere is carried by the presence of wood and floor tiles. The scale of the rooms and the way they are set into the ground make the house a place of refuge and of sharing, held in a game of shadows, scenarios and hedges.
The programme is not one building but three: a single family home of 220 square metres, a guest house of 37 and a wine cellar of 80, over two floors, built between January 2021 and February 2024. Read together they behave less like objects placed on a site than like weight added to it, which is what thick earth walls and a granite line drawn across a hillside amount to.
