This story begins with an old rose building on the riverside avenue of Vila Real de Santo António, a city located in the south of Portugal. The rose-house had a nice and rational facade, but the real treasure was inside. An exotic interior with details such as a mermaid painting in the ceiling of a bathroom, a multitude of patterned mosaics, detailed wooden doors and a big stone sink.

It was obvious from the beginning that we should keep and emphasize the exotic interior. The program asked for the transformation of the layout from a single house to a five apartments building and gave us the perfect reason to create five different environments that play with site-specific idiosyncrasies of each space. A selection of colors and materials, combined with extensive architecture details preservation and the introduction of new contemporary elements, allowed us to create five flats with distinctive personalities, where each one is contributing to a general set that pays homage to the exotic qualities that we found in the original building.