Dias Apartment | Arquitectura Viva

The clients had just bought a small two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a 1980s building in the centre of Leiria. It was a flat with lots of nooks and crannies, where the owners wanted to simplify the layout as much as possible and gain useful space, both in terms of rooms and for storage. In this small 2-bedroom apartment, it was necessary to accommodate for the entire domestic programme and it was not possible to change the location of either the kitchen or the bathroom, due to infrastructural issues. With these premises in mind, the decision was made to open up the house, demolish a large part of the walls and create cabinet and door layouts that would allow space to be gained and bring various types of movement to the space.

The foyer became the key point of the whole project. An entrance hall, a box clad in birch plywood, with low ceilings, no natural light and where we would otherwise feel confined by space and squeezed into a waiting room only to enter a large, bright, light-coloured flat that, despite being small, seems more spacious than it really is.

With this in mind, the functionality of the space was resolved: various ceiling heights to control or expand the space, the kitchen and living room functioning as an open plan, one of the bedrooms that now has only a wardrobe to separate it from the corridor, the pivoting door in the hall that when opened serves as a shoe rack for those in the entrance. As the bathroom is very small, the decision was made to remove the entire wall at the entrance and replace it with a large sliding door, which can be opened completely to allow natural light and ventilation into the room when the laundry is being done.