双子别墅（Casas Gêmeas）

The project elaboration has started from the request of building two houses on the same site – each one for one brother. The lofts are almost the same, having only some small modifications in program and detail between them, and that’s where their nickname comes from Casas Gêmeas, which in Portuguese means "twin houses". Attending each dweller specificity, one of the houses has a wide living room located on the ground floor and two bedrooms and a suite upstairs. In the other house, part of the living room was transformed into an office/clinic, since the owner often works from home.

One of the bedrooms upstairs was turned into a flexible room which can assume diverse uses. Due to the narrow lot, providing less than 10 meters wide for each house, we chose to occupy its lateral distance and make room for three patios. Those openings bring the outside inside the house, creating a fluid and blurred line between them. Besides the frontal and the backyard patio, there is the central patio, one of the residence’s main elements, responsible for bringing light and air to the social areas placed around it.

The project’s natural lightening and airing aspects – and consequently its windows and accesses – were carefully thought and optimized. The wide frames play an important role in allowing the environments to be flexible and integrate, spatially and visually. The kitchen, for instance, can be closed or added to the dining room. The same occurs in one of the bedrooms that can be turned into a living room, an office or can be closed and used as a bedroom for occasional visitors.

The patio when used with open frames, can be an extension for the living room, the stair’s corridor, and the dining room, turning the whole ground floor into a single environment, with a greater feeling of spaciousness. In order to control the levels of brightness and provide privacy for the owners, some openings have received translucent glass (for example in the toilets), while others, metallic blinds (as the ones located in the suites). The sunlight also comes through skylights. The ground floor concentrates mostly the social environments – living room, dining room, kitchen, laundry and office (in one of the houses).

The idea was to keep the floor as fluid as possible, without walls or any visual block, integrating the patio and providing light to the rest. Going upstairs, the footbridge enveloped in glass provides an overview of the patio and divides the main suite from the other rooms and intimate environments. The constructive elements are simple, mostly prefab components such as concrete slabs and structural bricks. Between the two houses, above the wall, there is a band of perforated material that helps to keep the privacy on the first floor between then but still provides luminosity in a delicate way.