Plotting the sun path00
18:52
Before we draw a wall, we draw the sun's path over the site — every hour of the longest day. This is Casa do Penhasco, forty metres above the Atlantic. Take the sun and move it.
01 — Selected works
Hover a project · 38 houses built since 2011, none of them on flat ground
02 — Case study
A — Plan, 1:200
The buildable shelf is eleven metres deep. We put the whole programme on it as a single bar, turned eleven degrees off the cliff edge so the living floor faces 240° — the bearing of the last light on the longest day.
Roof lifted off at +38.10 · Sun at 17:18, 41° above the sea
B — Section A–A
The upper floor bears on two concrete walls pinned nine metres into the rock. The lower slab cantilevers 6.4 metres toward the sea and carries the pool like a tray. Nothing touches the cliff face that doesn't have to.
Cut through the pool and living room · looking north-east
C — Detail, 19:18
The pool's west wall is a single pane of 19 mm laminated glass, set flush with a 6 mm overflow. At golden hour the water keeps the sun for eleven minutes after it has left the terrace.
Golden hour · sun at 291°, 11° above the sea
03 — Principles
We plot the sun over the site for a full year before a single wall is drawn. The plan follows the light — never the other way round.
Board-marked concrete poured against Portuguese pine. It takes the grain of the wood, the colour of the local aggregate and, over decades, the weather. We don't paint it.
A deep overhang does more than any glass coating. We design the shadows first: where they fall at noon in July, how far they reach at four in December.
Extreme sites are fragile sites. We stand on as few points as possible, rebuild with the rock we excavate, and leave the cliff looking as if we were never there.
04 — Studio
Lisbon gets 2,800 hours of sun a year. Oslo gets 1,670 — and a June night that never quite gets dark. We work across both, so every house is argued over by people who treat daylight very differently.
05 — Commissions
Coordinates are enough to begin. Send us a pin and we'll send back a sun study of your land — every hour, every season — before we ever talk about a house.