Law Office in São João da Madeira | Nelson Resende Arquitecto

The place, a small existent area in a comercial and residential building, is located near the São João da Madeira’s Court, and it provides good accessibility conditions, as solar exposition, parking and a central location.

Despite the dimensions, this place allows the conditions to install a lawyer’s office, with the essential needs solved, as a small place to attend and receive the clients, a small washroom and the office itself.

This approach was made to improve these functional relations, between the referred spaces and it made an optimization of the circumstances, mainly offering the windows and the natural light to the office and the spaces where there is more permanent use, transferring the circulation area and small supports like archive into the interior.

The walls where substituted by wardrobes, and all the impositions where studied to improve some small aspects like better areas, archives or artificial lightning, making them work in the process as if they were just approved instead of imposed possibilities.

We tried to reduce the type of the used materials with the purpose to simplify the solution and make it less interdependent, obtaining less time of construction and making it cheaper.

We wanted to increase the result by using just the wood panels to solve the walls, furniture, pavement, mixing all the elements and transforming them into a kind of mask to the office.

We used a dense modulation, with small elements, to improve the space proportion, to reduce the smallness sensation, dissimulate the several plans, almost decomposing the construction elements.

We wanted to create an abstract image, easily manageable, but simultaneously less usual, may be out of the actual tendencies to create very clean spaces, but conferring also a personalized environment, without pretensions and any kind of pressure.

This office works as a place with character, searching a certain kind of timeless and neutrality, perhaps like if it was there even before its existence.