Vidago rural house

— Vidago rural house by Nuno Graça Moura —

Vidago is the last project that I finished and is probably the project that gave me more joy to do. I'm not sure why, but it gave me immense joy to do it. It’s a recovery, it was an abandoned rural center, quite run down but despite that you could still identify what was consolidated.

The first problem was what I will renovate.
The program was quite undefined, it’s a program for a famous hotel unit in Portugal, the Hotel Vidago, it’s part of the hotel property but remote. And what they wanted was simply some multipurpose rooms to parties or to receive events. There wasn't much of a program. They also wanted a space where they could keep animals for playful purposes. People are at the hotel, take the children and see the farm animals...

So the first problem I had was how will I renovate it. I tried to understand how it was, not originally because in these things there’s no original [...] but instead I tried to give meaning to the shapes that existed there.
And then I confess that, on one hand I recovered what was absolutely recoverable, and I had some luck because regarding the most difficult aspects of a renovation - that has to do with problems with the heat, with modern comfort in older buildings or with windows - there were no great constraints since it was essentially to use in the summer. And those houses in the summer are very fresh and so there was no need to get thermal insulation, window frames with double glazing, etc., things that completely disfigure this houses usually. There wasn't this problem.

I tried to recover what I thought was more or less recoverable. I tried to give sense to the shapes, the sense that seemed reasonable for the shapes that existed there. So it wasn’t about making something that looks like it has to do with the old, it was about trying to somehow create something in the same language that existed there, and with the same grammar elements of the construction you could find there.

It was a very cheap work to build, made with very simple means, the minimum, the essential, nothing special. Made with debris sometimes, for example, we made a beautiful wooden floor of pinewood from some old beams, found in some nearby buildings, with over hundred years. A great floor, with an unpretentious look, no "design", just a normal thing.
You get there and you can’t realize very well what I did. And I think that's one thing that satisfies me, it has not signature.

And then one thing I noticed, the old house had all the rooms painted in different colors, so I tried to at recreate that. I changed all the interior spaces because they had to be bigger, but then I thought of painting it in different colors, each room with a different color. I realized I couldn’t, after several experiments. I couldn’t resist and I painted the kitchen in a light blue, since the traditional kitchens were blue.
Everything else... baseboards, ceilings - the ceilings are made of wood - in cream, the walls are white and frames are red, which was what already existed there. So nothing too jarring. And that's it.