Vila Gadanho

Project Details

Location

Penha de França, Lisboa

Total area

97 sq.m

Status

Completed

Year

2024

Lead Architect

Luísa Martins e Silva

Refurbishment and extension of a small townhouse in Vila Gadanho, a historic workers' housing community built in 1907 in Penha de França, Lisbon. With a footprint of just 40 sq m, the project transformed the existing structure into a two-bedroom duplex through a loft conversion and a targeted extension into the rear courtyard. Preserving the original façade and enhancing the connection with the outdoor space were central to the layout of the new home, where bespoke solutions and a retro-contemporary aesthetic maximize a compact footprint.

The challenge

How do you create a two-bedroom home where there was barely space for one?

Vila Gadanho comprises a series of small terraced cottages, originally built on a single storey and organized into four interconnected rooms. Modest in character, these structures were arranged around a small rear courtyard, which initially housed the outdoor drainage sinks and was later adapted to accommodate basic sanitary facilities.

It was within this context that the client's brief emerged to convert one of these cottages into a functional two-bedroom home. The limited floor area and compact dimensions of the original structure made this layout program particularly demanding.

Furthermore, the intervention was constrained by the need to preserve the village's historic identity. The main façade had to retain its original design — defined by a simple composition of a single door and window — alongside its traditional timber window frames. Any extension into the rear courtyard needed to be restrained, ensuring the retention of the outdoor garden area.

The challenge was therefore to expand the home's capacity without significantly increasing its physical footprint on the plot—finding room for two bedrooms while simultaneously securing natural daylight, privacy, integrated storage, and a feeling of spaciousness..

The solution

The solution lay in exploiting a dimension that had remained largely untapped: height. While retaining the original ridge line at the main elevation, the roof pitch was raised towards the rear, converting the under-roof attic space into a fully functional duplex..

On the ground floor, the layout prioritises a longitudinal relationship with the rear courtyard. Although developed within a narrow footprint, the kitchen was integrated into an open-plan social area that extends visually into the garden.This connection allows what might otherwise feel like a narrow corridor to gain natural daylight, depth, and a sense of scale.

Towards the front, a compact cloakroom was introduced, freeing up the remaining floor area for a street-facing study. By streamlining the circulation to its absolute essentials, every square metre fulfills a clear operational purposewithout cluttering the space.

The upper floor houses the private realm of the home, featuring a master suite beneath the sloping ceiling.Generous roof windows harness the new volume, maximizing daylight infiltration and natural ventilation.

Rather than disguising the home's compact footprint, the design scheme actively embraced it. The visual continuity with the exterior, strategic daylighting, and vertical volume ensure the house feels significantly more spacious than its floor area suggests.

Materially, the proposal adopts a bold visual language that intersects retro references with a contemporary sensibility:herringbone laminate flooring dialogues with hexagonal tiles, paired alongside forest-green kitchen cabinetry and light-grey shaker-style doors. The result is a compact home defined by a sharp, memorable identity.

A small project is by no means a simple one. On the contrary: the tighter the footprint, the higher the demand on every single architectural decision.