Falcão de Campos Expands a Lisbon Garage into a Five-Story Family Home Behind Its Own Facade

Campo de Ourique is one of Lisbon's quieter bourgeois neighborhoods, a late 19th-century grid of rectangular blocks and generous avenues northwest of the city center. The streets are lined with buildings that mostly share a common cornice height, a common material palette, and a common sense of restraint. When Falcão de Campos was asked to turn an old single-story garage on Rua Francisco Metrass into a five-bedroom family house, the problem was not just spatial but contextual: how do you quintuple the height of a building without rupturing the grain of a neighborhood that was designed to look like it had always been there?

The answer is a full demolition behind the original facade line, a rebuild to five levels, and a new street front that reads less like an infill apartment block and more like a piece of large-scale furniture. Board-formed concrete, perforated brick screens, cantilevered bay windows, and horizontal louvered panels are stacked in a composition that changes character at every floor. The result is a house that occupies nearly the full depth of its lot, hides a rear garden with a pool on the roof of its first floor, and fits three cars at street level. It is a lot of program for a modest frontage, and the architecture never pretends otherwise.

A Street Facade Built in Layers

The facade is the project's public argument, and it makes its case through accumulation rather than simplicity. Each floor presents a different configuration of solid, screen, and void. Board-formed concrete gives the base levels a rough, geological weight, while the upper stories break forward with projecting bay windows that catch raking sunlight. Horizontal louvered panels sit between these volumes, offering shade and privacy without sealing off the interior from the street.

What keeps the composition from becoming chaotic is a strict vertical alignment. The bays project at consistent angles, the concrete surfaces share a single formwork texture, and the overall proportions defer to the neighboring buildings' cornice lines. It is a new building that acknowledges it is new, without shouting about it.

Perforated Brick as Privacy Screen

On another elevation, the material logic shifts entirely. Cream-colored perforated brick towers rise alongside recessed glazed openings, creating a secondary skin that filters light and views. The brick modules are laid in a repeating pattern dense enough to block sightlines from the street but open enough to let air circulate and daylight scatter into the rooms behind.

The contrast between this warm, porous surface and the heavier concrete of the main facade suggests that each face of the building was calibrated to its specific orientation and exposure. It is a quiet but effective move: the house does not look the same from every angle because it does not need to perform the same task from every angle.

Ground Level: Garage, Ramp, and Garden

At street level, the building opens to a three-car garage framed by board-formed concrete columns and a ceiling that reveals the planted courtyard above through a rectangular opening. The sensation is of being under a thick slab of landscape rather than inside a parking structure. A concrete ramp descends between textured walls, pulling filtered daylight from the trees overhead and channeling it into the lower level.

At dusk, recessed indirect lighting strips transform the carport into something more deliberate. The light washes across the concrete formwork, emphasizing the grain of the boards and turning a utilitarian space into something almost civic in its generosity. This is a family garage, but it has been treated with the same material seriousness as the living spaces above.

Interior Thresholds and Material Transitions

Inside, the house negotiates between rough and refined. A glazed exterior elevator shaft sits alongside a planted green wall, visible through sliding glass doors that dissolve the boundary between corridor and garden. Elsewhere, a covered concrete pavilion with a timber-clad column and board-formed walls operates as a transitional space between indoors and out, its indirect lighting recessed into the ceiling to avoid any visible fixtures.

The material palette is consistent but never monotonous. Board-formed concrete appears on walls and ceilings, timber paneling on columns and built-in furniture, and stone on floors. Where these materials meet, the junctions are clean and considered. A recessed timber panel turns a corner against a stone floor with no visible trim, letting the materials speak for themselves.

Living with the Street

Several rooms engage directly with Rua Francisco Metrass through street-level windows and built-in benches. A timber-framed storefront opens onto the cobblestones, its deep sill furnished with a bench that invites sitting and watching. Inside, plywood-paneled walls wrap around storage cabinets and seating below the window, creating a compact nook that functions somewhere between a reading room and a guard post.

On an upper floor, white walls and wooden flooring frame corner windows that look out over parked cars and plane trees. The rooms are not large, but they are proportioned to feel calm. The relationship between the house and the street is not defensive: it is curious, measured, and specific to each level.

Concrete, Light, and Vertical Circulation

The staircase is the building's spine, and it has been given its own material identity. Board-formed concrete walls rise alongside ascending treads, punctuated by three circular light fixtures that cast controlled pools of illumination onto the textured surface. The stair is not hidden or minimized; it is a room in its own right, one that you pass through multiple times a day.

A diagonal cut of light across a darkened interior space reveals how precisely the apertures have been positioned. This is not ambient daylight filling a room; it is a controlled shaft entering at a specific angle, hitting a specific wall, at a specific time of day. The board-formed concrete absorbs and scatters this light in a way that smooth plaster never could, giving each room a character that shifts with the sun.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan confirms the building's position on a corner lot adjacent to a public square, a condition that explains the careful treatment of multiple facades. Floor plans reveal a ground-level garage transitioning to typical residential floors with angled walls that respond to the lot geometry rather than imposing a pure rectangle. The section drawings are especially revealing: five staggered levels with balconies stepping back from the street wall, and a clear relationship to the neighboring context buildings that are two and three stories shorter.

The construction details repay close reading. Facade assembly drawings show how concrete floor slabs, glazing systems, and balcony railings are layered into a single wall thickness. Window head and sill details illustrate the depth of the reveals, while sliding track systems for interior glazed partitions demonstrate the commitment to flush surfaces and concealed hardware. These are the drawings of a practice that thinks through junctions, not just compositions.

Why This Project Matters

Lisbon is full of conversions right now, but most of them involve gutting 18th- or 19th-century buildings and inserting contemporary interiors behind preserved stone facades. Falcão de Campos took a different route: starting with a one-story commercial structure that had no particular heritage value and building something entirely new that is five times taller. The decision to treat the new facade as a genuine piece of architectural design, rather than a neutral backdrop or a nostalgic pastiche, is the project's most important contribution.

The building also demonstrates that density and domesticity are not enemies. Five bedrooms, a three-car garage, a garden, and a pool on a single urban lot in a 19th-century grid: this is an extraordinary amount of private program packed into a modest footprint. That it manages to feel generous rather than cramped, and that it engages with the street rather than retreating from it, suggests that the densification of Lisbon's residential neighborhoods does not have to mean the end of spatial quality. It just requires architects who are willing to think vertically and detail carefully.

Residential Building in Rua Francisco Metrass, designed by Falcão de Campos. Located in Lisboa, Portugal. 1055 m². Completed in 2020. Photography by José Manuel Rodrigues and Catarina Picciochi.

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