Modern Architecture
A contemporary house facing the golf course
Overlooking the Oitavos Dunes Golf Course, the house designed by Atelier Nunes da Silva cleverly explores minimalistic principles to enhance the unique features of the seaside plot in Quinta da Marinha, Cascais. Devised to optimise vistas, the layout plays with openness and enclosure; alternation between the two being a major feature of the architecture and experience of the house.
From the street, the house presents an almost hermetic design. Upon entering the gate facing a cobblestone patio with huge pines, a white wall extending perpendicular to the street leads to the main door, invisible from the gate. Next to the door to the left, a floor-to-ceiling glass-panelled passageway allows a first glimpse of the garden and acts as a visual transition between the hermetic entrance and the architecture about to unfold.
Openness and lightness
Once inside the house, the impression of enclosure experienced in the entrance disappears entirely, giving way to a sensation of openness and lightness.
Floor-to-ceiling glass on the east, south and west façades erodes the division between house and garden. The interior architecture echoes the minimalistic exterior, from polished surfaces to free-standing stairs.
Opaque and semi-transparent cantilevers along the main façade add to the sensation of lightness and weightlessness. The five-metre-long opaque structure projecting pillarless out of the dining room seems to defy gravity, while the semi-transparent cantilevers outside the living room bring in light and movement to the main façade.
As the sun moves round, the light slanted through the cantilevers changes, creating slim shadows on the white walls of the house in a subtle, continuous movement that works pleasingly against the geometric architectural lines.
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Green and blue
Beneath the cantilevers, large terraces offer a peerless view: a garden seamlessly blending into the golf course and ending in the blue of the sea.
To ensure perfect continuity between the greens and blues of the landscape when one looks down from the house, the pool area was designed on a lower plane from the garden, the lounge chairs and the pool’s terrace thus concealed by the grass.
Lake-like in shades of greyish blue, the infinity pool appears rooted in the garden.
