Apartment Of Skewed Relations
APARTMENT OF SKEWED RELATIONS
Fala
ARCHITECTS
Fala
CONTRACTOR
Civiflanco
DESIGN TEAM
Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares, Ahmed Belkhodja, Lera Samovich, João Carlos Lopes, Taewoo Jin
PHOTOGRAPHS
Francisco Ascensão, Lera Samovich
AREA
150 m²
YEAR
2026
LOCATION
Porto, Portugal
CATEGORY
Apartments
English description provided by the architects.
A large apartment in the city centre was to be renovated. The original plan, inefficient and deeply segregated, was hastily erased, leaving behind only a handful of columns, technical risers, and the peculiar outline of the perimeter.
Within such an irregular boundary, any conventional orthogonal arrangement seemed inadequate. The project therefore adopts a different strategy: a fluid, deliberately fragmented space whose limits are often ambiguous.
The apartment is organised through a sequence of walls that assume different positions and angles in dialogue with the outer perimeter. Rooms do not appear as closed entities, but rather as episodes within a continuous field.
Some are provided with two doors, allowing multiple paths through the apartment and encouraging a fluid reading of the domestic landscape. A proliferation of doors reinforces this choreography: large plywood panels connect the shifting walls and periodically reconfigure the spatial sequence.
The material palette intensifies this sense of fragmentation. Walls avoid the expected neutrality of white or beige, alternating instead between pale green and light blue.
Glass brick and mint-coloured tiles introduce additional layers, catching and diffusing light throughout the interior.
The existing columns, thick and slightly awkward, are not concealed but emphasised through marble, mirror, or metal cladding, becoming anchors within the unstable geometry. A continuous neutral floor and ceiling frame this purposeful disorder.
Against this calm background, flashes of bright green and orange punctuate the narrative. At its centre, the kitchen lands almost as a foreign object: a chubby semicircle closer to an art piece than to a familiar domestic device, hovering somewhere between furniture and architecture.
Nothing is out of place, yet nothing settles entirely. The apartment becomes a nervous constellation of walls, doors, colours and objects negotiating a stubborn perimeter. A domestic landscape in which rooms never fully agree.
