Photography courtesy of Pedro Duarte Bento.
Here’s a house that fits all the right notes for us this fall: a family house in the rural town of Lardosa, Portugal, with bone-white walls, matte black details, oil lamps, and simply hewn wooden shelves.
“The front of the house faces the village’s street, and in its back side has a small farm filled with orange trees and an acre or so of an olive grove facing Serra da Gardunha, a modest mountain range towards north,” Bento says.
A lesson in sparseness: A wide, sculptural doorway leads into the kitchen.
The house’s exterior façades and its perimeter footprint remained unaltered.” The finished space is only 1,290 square feet.
The kitchen, with poured-in-place concrete countertops and backsplash (“single pour,” Bento says) and a rough-hewn wooden island.
By the small gas cooktop is a well-appointed pegboard, which holds kitchen shears and even a silver pitcher.
In an otherwise austere kitchen, necessary storage doubles as design, as in the knife rack beside the cooktop. The sculptural vent hood cover and the base for the range are both made of thin steel, painted with primer and matte white paint, and made by a local metalworker.
Bento chose waxed woodwork as a third main material, and it’s a theme repeated throughout the house.
The dining area and living room beyond.
All of the furniture was existing in the house, including the wood hutch and dining chairs, both “believed to be from the 1960s,” Bento says.
Adding to the olden-days feel: a glass oil lamp.
In the living area, attention is focused on the lower half of the room, with a simple woven mat and a low, waxed-wood bookshelf built into one wall.
In one corner, an Alvar Aalto lookalike stool serves as an end table.
The north annex, previously a storage room, now has black-painted floors and ceilings, in contrast to the rest of the house. Here, a simple bedroom and study is trimmed in waxed wood, with a low, Shaker-like hanging shelf for books.
Removable black hooks turn the simple lengths of wood into storage.