Plywood Built-Ins Reframe a Family’s Flat at a Revered Modernist Development in Lisbon

Matilde Girão and Ricardo Lima had recently moved into their new apartment when they ran into a couple of architects who had been their professors in college. Matilde and Ricardo, now architects themselves, quickly learned that their professors were actually neighbors in the condominium where they had just renovated a flat for their own family. It was a pleasant surprise, but more than just a chance encounter.

The Nova Oeiras development in Lisbon where they all live has long attracted fans of architecture, whether visiting design students or architects like Matilde and Ricardo or their professors. Designed by Luís Cristino da Silva, Pedro Falcão e Cunha, and Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles and built between 1953 and the early 1970s, the development is a lasting model for housing density and urban modernism in the Portuguese capital: a series of towers and low-set blocks intertwined with luscious parks that form a roundabout, with a shopping center at its core.

For this reason, Matilde and Ricardo, directors of their firm, Girão Lima Arquitectos, bought a unit in a tower built in 1968 to renovate for themselves and their now nine-year-old twins. The roughly 1,300-square-foot, three-bedroom flat is on the fifth level, at "the perfect height to watch birds from the balcony," Matilde enthusiastically points out. The couple is responsible for larger works like the Rehearsal Hall for the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, the renovation of the former AEM warehouse in Massagno, Switzerland, and a primary school in Bitonto, Puglia, currently under construction. But now they faced a "relatively simple and straightforward renovation" on a strict budget, explains Ricardo.