rar.studio Threads a Carpentry System Through the Attic of a Português Suave Townhouse in Lisbon

Palatina is a small palace in the center of Lisbon. Architect Carlos Rebelo de Andrade designed it in the mid-20th century in the Português Suave style, the conservative, regionally flavored idiom that the Estado Novo period favored. It was built as a single-family residence and later divided into apartments. With Palatina II Apartment, completed in 2016, rar.studio returns to the building for a second time and reworks a 200 m² unit under its pitched roof.

The project is interesting less for any single gesture than for its method. rar.studio uses a carpentry system to interlink the different parts of the intervention: shelving, sliding panels, a stair and door linings that read as one continuous piece of joinery. In a building with a strong stylistic identity, the studio adds a new layer of furniture-scale architecture that organizes the plan, and it does not compete with the shell for attention. The palette is short, mostly stone and wood. The joinery carries the design.

Living Under the Trusses

The roof structure is the first thing you notice. The timber trusses and beams are painted white and left fully exposed, so the sloping ceilings set the proportions of every room. Pine floorboards in the loft and a herringbone pine floor in the living area warm the space, and that warmth stops the white structure from looking clinical.

We think painting the trusses was the right call. Left dark, they would have pressed down on the rooms. In white, they become a rhythm of lines that catches daylight from the side openings, and the attic reads as generous instead of cramped.

A Stair That Belongs to the Shelving

The open-riser stair, with its slatted white balustrade curving up from the parquet, is the clearest expression of the carpentry system. It sits right against built-in shelves, and the two are finished in the same white, so the stair looks like an extension of the storage wall. It does not read as a separate structural element.

Because the risers are open and the balustrade is slatted, light passes through the stair. The space underneath stays usable and visually connected to the rooms beyond. A conventional closed stair in this position would have split the floor in two.

Joinery as Partition

Across the apartment, walls are replaced or lined by floor-to-ceiling bookcases and flush sliding doors. A white bookcase divides one parquet-floored room. Elsewhere, shelving runs alongside a doorway onto the kitchen, with a sliding panel set flush into it. The hallway pairs a timber stair and white balusters with tall built-in storage.

This is where the interlinking idea pays off. Storage, circulation and room division are solved by a single system, so the plan reads as one continuous interior that can be closed off when you need privacy. It suits a converted single-family house, where the original room sizes rarely match how people live in an apartment today.

Where Stone Meets Pine

The material shifts are handled with restraint. Dark grey stone tiles meet light pine parquet along a straight, crisp seam, with no transition strip or threshold profile. The change in surface marks a change in use, wet or service areas against living rooms, and the plan stays open.

The detail is small but tells you a lot. A studio that resolves its floor junctions this cleanly is treating the interior as built architecture, not decoration, and that discipline carries through the rest of the project.

Light, Terrace and the Lisbon Roofscape

Sliding glass doors open the living room onto a roof terrace with palms and views over tiled rooftops. Sunlight cuts deep across the parquet. In the kitchen, sage green cabinets sit beneath a long strip window that frames the same roofscape at counter height.

The green kitchen is the one place where color goes beyond wood and white. Seen through openings from the living room, it gives the eye a point to land on. The city view is framed horizontally at the height where you actually stand and work, not presented as a picture window.

Plans and Drawings

The existing attic plan shows labeled rooms, a round spiral stair and grids of skylights. The proposed plan rearranges bedrooms, bathrooms, a kitchen and a dining area around a central hall. The section cuts through the pitched roof and shows a shelving wall standing in the middle of the open interior. It confirms that the joinery acts as a spatial divider, not as furniture pushed against walls.

Why This Project Matters

Lisbon has many mid-century buildings that have been divided, subdivided and adapted over the decades. Palatina II offers a useful model for working inside them. It accepts the shell, exposes and lightens the roof structure, and lets a single carpentry system handle storage, circulation and separation. The intervention is legible and reversible in spirit, and it stays out of an argument with Português Suave.

There is also a broader lesson about where design effort goes. rar.studio puts its energy into joinery and junctions, not into new walls or new forms. In a 200 m² apartment that is the right scale of ambition. You live with these elements every day, at arm's length, and the project shows how far a well-drawn shelf, stair and sliding door can carry an interior.

Palatina II Apartment by rar.studio, Lisbon, Portugal. Area: 200 m². Completed: 2016. Photography: Francisco Nogueira.

About the Studio

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