CR Apartment
ESQVTA was simple and silent when designing within the existing framework and history to respond to modern needs imposed by their clients in this Lisbon apartment.
Any kind of intervention in this space should not interfere with the existing one. More than proposing it was necessary to omit, more than designing it was necessary to recover and integrate, more than composing it was necessary to be simple and silent with rigour in response to new needs.
The apartment is integrated in a building originally designed as a Hotêl Particulier. The apartment occupies the 1st floor, originally the floor of the rooms – 11 rooms, one of them used as a bathroom. Being a social floor, almost all the walls and ceilings of these rooms were decorated with rich wall paintings.
When transformed into an individual fraction of housing, the apartment was occupied by Pedro Espirito Santo known as the host of the best parties and dinners in Lisbon and the 11 rooms served this purpose perfectly.
In 2019 the apartment acquired a new owner, with a clear family structure. The intervention program in the space was based on the maintenance, conservation and restoration of all the architectural heritage of the property, but adapting it to family needs – from 1 bathroom we now have 6 independent bathrooms.
All the work was based on the premise that the interventions should be silent enough not to be noticed, or to dispute the attention for the preexisting.
If the recovery works were to be silent in the form and choice of materials, the interior design project chose a careful selection of timeless
design pieces – as if from the height of 18th century art we could in the same space and suddenly travel to what is best produced in 21st century design.
History is written today in a different language. With other objects, and arguments even if the principle remains present: a house to live and be lived in.
Design: ESQVTA
Photography: Ricardo Oliveira Alves
