The house was built around a single feeling: a childhood summer at a country house, where you're outside almost all the time, running in only to grab something to eat before heading back out to the garden. Everything else — the fireplace, the bathroom, the choice of materials — is one or another way of trying to hold onto that.

At the centre of the house is a fireplace, and behind it, a story. Its wall is covered in hand-painted azulejo — traditional Portuguese tilework, pigment applied to fired tile, the old unhurried way. The design is built from two layers, one drawn over the other. The first is a grid born from an unlikely reference: an illustrated edition of Ballad of the Little Tugboat, a children's poem by Joseph Brodsky — the only one of his poems ever published in the USSR — about a small tugboat that stays at the dock while the larger ships sail off to distant countries, because someone has to remain. Brodsky left Russia and never returned. So did Oksana Penaguião, the architect behind this house (and founder of ão studio).

Over that first layer sits the second: the iconography of Alentejo itself — goats, fields, the rhythm of farm life. Penaguião drew the imagery; artist André Trafic brought it onto the tile, translating the drawings into the hand-painted technique, stroke by stroke. One layer carries the personal story; the other, the place. 

The rest of the house works the same way, at a lower register. Nothing here pretends to be something it isn't. The floors are fired terracotta clay — unglazed, untreated, left exactly as raw as the region has always made it. The kitchen and bathrooms continue the same visual language as the fireplace mural, worked into other azulejo panels around the house, always in the same hand, the same blue and white. In the bedroom, the pattern recedes to a silhouette — a shape cut into a blue-painted wall behind the bed, azulejo with no image left in it at all.

The en-suite bathroom returns to the house's opening feeling directly. A freestanding stone washbasin stands where a wall might have been, its surface as raw as the tile floor beneath it. There's nothing to hide here — the room stays open, the way a summer house does, a place you retreat to only from the heat, or to wait out the rain. 

Around these moments, the house stays quiet: oak, white linen, woven chairs, black taps against raw stone. Ordinary materials, handled with unusual care — which is, in the end, the same idea as the fireplace itself.

Colour here does the work restraint usually does — it holds the space together, room by room. Deep blue carpet meets warm walnut in the bedroom; a burnt-orange rug anchors the living room beneath a curved white sofa; an oxblood credenza catches the light near the dining table. Nothing is muted by default, because muted wasn't the point — this is a home built around presence, not absence.


Walnut panelling runs through nearly every room, warm and low-lit, holding a wall of records and books, a gallery of portraits, found and personal in equal measure. Every space carries something specific — a green-carpeted study, a plaster bust watching over the bed — the kind of detail that only accumulates once a place has been fully claimed.