JC Apartment - Apartamento Av. João Crisóstomo | João Tiago Aguiar, arquitectos

The Project consisted in the refurbishment of an old apartment in Lisbon’s city centre with generous areas but too compartmented. Its nobleness remained both in the high-ceilinged and in the ornate ceilings as opposed to an inadequate space to the needs of dwelling nowadays.
The main goal of the project was the demand for optimization of all areas in a simple functional scheme that answered today’s needs, preserving and framing in the new solutions all existing elements of exceptional character.

One more bathroom was added, two small bedrooms became into one single bedroom of much more generous areas and the dining room at the bottom changed into a suite.

In order to counteract the appearance of old and lack of light that the house exhibited, we’ve tried to bring as much natural light inside the apartment as possible and at the same time designed artificial skylights in front of each door (4 in total) along the corridor in order to break the effect of a long tunnel simulating this way a natural light environment.

Relatively to the floor, we chose to remove all the carpet that covered it and assumed wooden floors in all areas (sometimes by recovering the wooden floor that virtually covers the whole house and some other times by replacing the existing mosaic by wood in the bathrooms and kitchen), giving back all the nobility and dignity that was inherent to it.

In search of the highest possible luminosity, as new materials used we only have the Estremoz white marble stone and the white carpentry.