we stop by amazing Architect: Guilherme Vaz

Vieira do Minho, a small village in northern Portugal, Guilherme Vaz designed a fortresslike retreat that embraces the natural landscape while keeping it at bay.

“Nature to me is something quite frightening,” says the diminutive Guilherme Vaz, as we walk around the expansive site of the Valley House, a weekend home the young architect designed for his father in the village of Vieira do Minho in the north of Portugal. “Nature is so strong here. I wanted all the natural things to be on the outside.”

Vaz, whose practice is in Porto, harbors a city-dweller’s skepticism of nature. It may be beautiful, but it is also full of bugs that might trigger anaphylactic shock in your children. Vaz is not one to speak platitudes about blurring boundaries between inside and out, and in many ways, the Valley House is a bulwark of sorts: What is artificial is contained within this concrete shoebox of a building, and what’s wild is kept out, observable from generous terraces and huge windows.

Vaz took on this project while he was still a student, and his psychiatrist father proved an ideal client for an ambitious young architect. “He wasn’t really very interested. I would say to him, ‘I’m thinking of maybe four rooms instead of five.’ And he would say, ‘Oh,
okay.’” The project’s protracted gestation also meant that Vaz had time to get influences out of his system. (He admits to having one Glenn Murcutt–inspired version of the house.)

At first, the Valley House seems absurdly long. The entire living area is housed on one level, allowing the low structure to stretch across the northern boundary of the site. It is a concrete tube pointed directly at a spectacular mountain range to the east of the valley. Vaz initially wanted to keep the house that originally existed on the site, but severe dilapidation rendered it physically unusable. The old structure did, however, help to define the eastern end of the Valley House. “The old house was in the best location,” he says. It sat up on an embankment with stone retaining walls to the south and north. Stone walls are characteristic of this region, which is known for its dramatic topography and irrigation.

The concrete exterior of the house is rough—partly due to the inexperience of a local builder and partly due to the architect’s intent—and the rugged finish makes the side of the house look like another retaining wall. With its simple rectangular form, the house has an infrastructural presence in the landscape, making it appear as if the house itself is holding back the steep hill. A rooftop swimming pool sits on a neat rectangular lawn punctuated by concrete chimneys. In this way, the Valley House’s integration into the landscape is both fluid and artificial. Vaz’s father, however, preferred manicured lawns (served by sprinklers) to the architect’s original intention of allowing wild grasses to grow up around the house, which slightly compromises the artificial vs. natural separation that the house is trying to accentuate. Read more about it, here..