Blue House’s ultramarine lime plaster had to be applied to each facade in a single day, since the pigment is unstable and any seam or repair would show. The house, in the Marvila district of Lisbon, Portugal, is a renovation and extension by extrastudio of a single-story dwelling built in 1893, and the first of three residences the studio groups under the name casas poveras.
Marvila was estates and farmland before it became the city’s main industrial district in the 20th century, bounded by the Tagus River and rail lines. Its warehouses, long neglected, are now occupied by studios and galleries. The original house was kept intact. The extension changes only the exterior form and a side passage to the garden, and architectural elements from the old facades were removed, restored, and set into the new ones. Old and new share the same finish, so the two periods read only in the silhouette and the texture of the materials.
The clients asked for an open, loft-like interior across the 2700 sqft house and a garage built into the living room, so that cars and motorbikes could be worked on without separating that work from family life. At the street, a full-width cut forms a two-story courtyard that shades the bedrooms and screens them from view. Facing the garden, a triple-height space exposes the building’s full vertical scale. A legal constraint slices the rear facade diagonally at one corner, leaving a vertical strip of glazing. As at Jørn Utzon’s Can Lis, a band of light enters through it for a few minutes at the end of the day and turns slowly across the room.
Once the concept was fixed, the studio left finishes, textures, and colors to be decided on site with the craftsmen and clients. The entire ground floor is clad in aluminum sheet, hand-brushed by one of the craftsmen until the surface took on a soft, leather-like sheen. Interior walls carry only a gray plaster scratch coat, an inexpensive finish discovered during construction that unifies the rooms and links the house to Marvila’s past. The ultramarine was found in the existing building, and the pigmented lime plaster now covers the entire volume.
