André Simão and Nuno Bessa Stack a Home Above a Studio Inside a Barcelos Ruin

Barcelos is the kind of small Portuguese city where the historic center still holds its shape: tight streets, granite lintels, tile roofs stacked like scales. When a building in that fabric collapses halfway to ruin, it leaves a gap that is both problem and opportunity. André Simão and Nuno Bessa took on exactly this situation with Atelier 111 House, a 379-square-meter project completed in 2024 that occupies the shell of a partially ruined structure straddling two streets at different elevations. The result is a single building that functions as garage, architecture studio, and family home, distributed vertically across four floors.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is not the fact of adaptive reuse, which is commonplace in Portuguese towns, but the architects' refusal to treat the old and new as a polite dialogue. The original facades are kept intact, stone frames and white render included. Behind them, the interior has been completely gutted and rebuilt with a new timber beam structure, an open staircase in vivid green steel, and a rooftop floor clad in corrugated metal. The new material is unapologetic, yet the building reads as a single coherent thing from the street. That tension, between deference and assertiveness, is the engine of the whole design.

Two Streets, One Building

The building's two facades face north and south, opening onto streets at different levels. From the lower, north-facing street, you enter the ground floor: a parking garage with exposed timber beams and a polished concrete slab. From the higher, south-facing street, you walk directly into the first-floor architecture studio. Neither entrance announces itself as the "main" one. The architects let the topography decide.

The south facade is the more restrained of the two, a narrow white-rendered front with stone-framed openings that could belong to any house on the block. Look up, though, and a timber pergola and corrugated metal extension signal something new. The north facade is more exposed: the rooftop addition reads clearly as a contemporary volume sitting atop the historic shell. The corrugated metal is a deliberate provocation, bright and industrial against the plaster and stone below, but it works because its scale stays modest.

The Green Steel Spine

Connecting all four floors is a staircase that might be the most characterful element of the entire project. Its steel frame is painted a saturated green, somewhere between forest and emerald, and it rises through the building with open treads, slender stringers, and a vertical handrail that feels more like a ship's ladder than a domestic stair. The color is bold enough to read as a deliberate intervention, a clearly modern artery threaded through restored masonry.

The stair is more than circulation. In a building this narrow, it acts as a spatial event that announces each floor transition. Standing at the base and looking up through the open treads to the exposed timber joists above, you can read the full section of the house. This transparency is key: without it, the vertical stacking of programs could feel claustrophobic. Instead, each floor borrows volume from its neighbors.

Timber Structure as Surface

The architects chose timber beams as the primary structural system, and they left them exposed throughout the house. The ceilings are a rhythmic field of closely spaced joists that give every room a warm, directional quality. In the hallways, afternoon sunlight rakes across the beam undersides and timber flooring, producing long golden gradients that shift through the day.

Timber is also the dominant material for wall paneling, cabinetry, and even the stair treads, giving the interiors a material coherence that the plan's vertical fragmentation might otherwise undermine. The study area, tucked into a corner of the upper floors, demonstrates this well: wood-clad walls wrap into a timber ceiling, creating a pocket of warmth that feels deliberately monastic. It is a house where the structure is never hidden and never merely structural.

Living and Cooking on the Middle Floors

The open-plan living and dining areas occupy the second floor, sharing space with a kitchen that manages to be both practical and generous. A white island bench anchors the cooking zone, while pale timber cabinetry runs beneath the exposed beam ceiling. Plants appear everywhere, not as styling but as a persistent motif that blurs the line between inside and the narrow planted courtyard visible through the glazed doors.

The kitchen island deserves attention on its own terms: a wood-veneer panel on the front face, a terrazzo-like counter on top, and a tubular pendant overhead that keeps the lighting deliberately minimal. Doorways throughout these floors are framed in white, creating deep thresholds that separate rooms without closing them off. One doorway includes a cane transom panel, a small gesture that keeps the material palette from becoming predictable.

Bedrooms and Bathrooms at the Top

The third and fourth floors house three bedrooms and the bathrooms. These are the most restrained spaces in the project: white walls, integrated timber headboards, built-in wardrobes that disappear into the wall plane. The restraint is strategic. After the visual intensity of the green staircase and the dense timber ceilings below, the sleeping rooms feel like a release of pressure.

The bathrooms are another story entirely. Terrazzo surfaces cover the floors, walls, and vanity countertops, paired with timber cabinetry and a circular window of textured glass that filters light into a soft haze. A mesh-panel door near the vanity adds a layer of visual permeability, letting borrowed light pass between rooms. These are small spaces treated with genuine care, not afterthoughts.

Courtyard, Terrace, and the Rooftop Extension

Between the building's two facades, a narrow planted courtyard runs vertically through the section, letting light and air penetrate the deep plan. Looking up through the courtyard, you see timber-framed glazing, balconies, and a skylight framed by louvers with climbing plants threading along the edges. It is a classic Portuguese solution to the problem of the narrow urban lot, executed here with evident discipline.

The rooftop terrace, accessed from the fourth floor, is protected by a timber pergola that casts sharp shadow grids in midday sun. At dusk, the multi-level balcony structure reads almost as scaffolding, a skeletal timber frame set against the neighboring courtyard facades. The corrugated metal balustrade on the rooftop is the same material used on the extension's exterior, maintaining a tight material loop. From here, you look out over the rooftops of Barcelos, tile-red and densely packed, and the building's dual identity, old shell and new core, becomes fully legible.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plans confirm what the photographs suggest: the building is extremely narrow, with the staircase acting as the organizational core on every level. The ground floor accommodates a single vehicle and two flanking storage rooms. The first floor opens up for the studio workspace. The second floor gives over to the kitchen, dining, and living areas. The third floor arranges three bedrooms around a central bathroom and terrace. The north and south elevations reveal the contrast between the preserved lower floors and the added rooftop volume, while the roof plan shows the trapezoidal footprint with its vertical slat articulation. These are clean, legible drawings that make the sectional logic of the project immediately clear.

Why This Project Matters

Historic centers across Portugal are full of partially collapsed buildings waiting for someone to decide what they should become. The default response is often cautious: replicate what was there, insert minimal modern fixtures, keep the volume quiet. André Simão and Nuno Bessa take a different position. They preserve the facades and the street presence, but inside, they build a new building altogether: one with green steel, corrugated metal, and a spatial ambition that exceeds what the original structure ever offered. The mixed program of studio and home is not a compromise but a genuine advantage, keeping the building occupied through working hours and evening hours alike.

The project also demonstrates that material honesty does not require material uniformity. Timber, steel, terrazzo, corrugated metal, granite, cane, and mesh all coexist here, each doing a specific job and none pretending to be something else. That range of materials, held together by a consistent spatial logic and a confident color choice, is what elevates Atelier 111 House from a competent renovation to something worth studying. It is a project that respects its context without being intimidated by it.

Atelier 111 House by André Simão & Nuno Bessa. Barcelos, Portugal. 379 m². Completed 2024. Photography by Carlos Eduardo Vinagre.

About the Studio

André Simão & Nuno Bessa

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