House renovation in Ovar | Nelson Resende Arquitecto

The intervened house has a privileged location, given not only its centrality to the city of Ovar but also its strategic location, with Rua Alexandre Herculano providing the main access to the west and its patio to the east, with direct access to the urban park.

In this context, the house takes on a kind of duality, the result of its more formal main elevation, related to the urban fabric, and its rear elevation, including the patio, related to the city park.

This duality is paralleled by the greater care taken with the more formal spaces along the street and the lesser care taken with the more improvised spaces in the back yard.

The situation found before the intervention revealed an uncomfortable occupation, which adapted to the physical limitations imposed by the less well-resolved compartmentalization and, at the same time, an adaptive evolution that possibly corresponded to use criteria different from those that were at the origin of the house.

The intervention allowed us to think of the house as a whole and so the analysis, more impartial and less attached to the history of the house and the memories that have accumulated here, the result of the complementary analysis that the architectural survey allowed us to make, resulted in the following improvements:

- reduction of interior compartmentalization, making spaces more fluid and multipurpose, reducing the feeling of interiorization felt in some of them and introducing some fenestration to improve natural ventilation and lighting;

- more appropriate proportions between the areas and the uses assigned;

- creation of an interior staircase between all the floors, through a more proportionate and capable element, roughly in the center of the house;

- ensuring greater visual and formal coherence of the elements that make up the new intervention,

- ensure greater proximity of the interior space to the patio space, giving more value and use to the exterior support spaces;

- simultaneously allow for multiple uses of the various spaces and, at the same time, if desired, autonomy of the attic floor or basement floor in relation to the other floors of the house;

The intervention also sought, by introducing all the new infrastructures, to guarantee a complete update of the way the space is read and lived in, taking into account the new needs felt as well as the comfort conditions required.

Thus, far from looking for mimicry, the intervention sought plausible justification for its own existence through its constructive rigor and the viability of the uses it aimed to achieve, in a tension provoked between the things that have endured and those that have been created, in this permanent dialogue that confronts ways of doing and thinking that are more than a century apart.

The result of this dialog, of this juxtaposition, is proof of the validity of everything that has survived, but also of everything that, for one reason or another, has been built.