Portuguese practice Atelier 106 has recently refurbished this apartment in Lisbon‘s Benfica neighborhood adding glass walls to lights up the interior. The original flat had a characteristic structure of the time, with a long corridor for the distribution of the different spaces, quite compartmentalized.
The first thing that made sense in an area-constrained apartment consisted of “dissolving” the long corridor that marked the spatial organization-functioning as the skeleton of the house and giving it a function. In this sense, the walls that delimited the living room and kitchen – face to face – were torn down in order to extend space, both spatially and materially, as well as visually. The result was the transformation of three separate areas – living room, corridor and kitchen – into three communicating areas.
The new delimitation of the areas is created through two large iron window openings that separate the living room from the dining room and the kitchen, maintaining the visual connection and accentuating the depth of space. This design also allows giving greater brightness to the apartment. The continuity is also marked by the kitchen floor that extends to the new dining room. The ceramic floor, with the same dimensions as the existing wooden block, fits perfectly into this, creating a kind of “carpet” that fits the space intended for the dining room.
The project results, therefore, in a harmonious connection between past and present, a consequence of the preservation of typical elements of the time, combined with other contemporary ones. Some kitchen furniture was recovered, as well as the old chimney that coexists with the new structure of open wooden furniture. Attention to detail was one of the most important aspects, giving rise to a project in which each detail is important in the whole and contributes to its unity.
