João XXI Apartment

Lisboa, Portugal

2019 – 2023

In mixology, the study of combining ingredients to make a cocktail, one of the objectives is to achieve a new flavor resulting from the mixture of ingredients, while also allowing each of them to be distinguished. It’s a delicate balance between the individual and the collective.
This is a renovation project for an apartment in a traditional Lisbon building from the 1950s and 1960s, known as “cod’s tail”. This typology is characterized by extensive compartmentalization and a great distance between the kitchen and the social areas of the house.
The intervention strategy had two phases: first, selective demolitions, leaving stone-clad scars; then, the addition of a continuous volume for kitchen and storage, whose autonomous geometry crosses and traverses the existing spaces.
The detailing is intentionally ambiguous: it uses the language of the original project and leaves doubts between the preexisting elements and the intervention, the ingredients, and the resulting mixture.