Real Estate Agency
REAL ESTATE AGENCY
Fala Atelier
ARCHITECTS
FALA ATELIER, filipe magalhães, ana luisa soares, ahmed belkhodja, clara pailler, camelia petre, christina kavoura
PHOTOGRAPHY
flávio pires
YEAR
2015
LOCATION
Porto, Portugal
TYPE
Commercial › Office
The clients acquired an old clothing store in the suburbs from Oporto. The brief requested the space to be transformed into a new agency for their real estate company and the intervention had to be designed and implemented in less than 4 weeks.
The new design should define the conceptual basis for all their future stores. The interior space, last refurbished in the early 90’s, was in good condition but outdated.
A few small renovations and additions made the store irrelevant and none of the existing fittings or furniture seemed fit to be reused. The space was quite long, with virtually no storefront and little natural light.
The total budget for the renovation, less than 10.000€ including furniture, left little margin for imagination. The project proposed to reduce the space to simple composition of rooms: using only white planes, the old identity of the store was erased, allowing for a non-referential canvas to be defined.
At the end of the store, the meeting room window punctuates a moment of disequilibrium: the uncommon size and form of the opening provide a rare sense of scale for such a space.
The lighting solutions used, with LED linear lights, are both banal and patterned. The counter, tables and vertical screens were made out of metal structures cladded in different kinds of marble.
The heavy stone pieces became the spatial actors with their glossy and reflective attitude. Contrasting with the modesty of the spatial intervention, a clear sense of status was conveyed.
