Magalhães House Index

The starting point for the Magalhães family was their discomfort with the claustrophobic corridors of the neighbouring 'colonial' houses, which was happily in accord with my own desire to make the centre of the house a space of shifting definition - from entrance hall, to central circulation space, to part of the living room, and to open all rooms off it. This gave a wonderful opportunity to introduce a vertical space into what was necessarily, due to the size of the accommodation required, a horizontal plan. It also gave space and reason to a feature which lifted the house from being an anonymous white box: a wall clad with boards of frejo wood rising to a skylight.

This wall reminded me of a disassembled boat I had seen in the National Maritime Museum, in which the 3-dimensional form of the boat was implicit in the spaces between the strakes. In the Magalhães House the wall is cut and folded to provide almost a map of the house.