PFArchStudio: Engaging, sustainable and contemporary architecture

By Malin Norman | Photos: João Morgado

PFArchStudio is an award-winning Portuguese architecture practice. The team works in dialogue with the given context, creating ageless designs that become even more beautiful with time and as they integrate with the surrounding nature.

After working as a collaborator, co-author and associate in several architectural offices, Pedro Ferreira set up his own studio in 2012. With offices in Esposende and Porto, PFArchStudio shares extensive experience in various sectors of the construction industry. With a team of 25, the studio designs buildings nationwide, specialising in intervention in pre-existing buildings, with a focus on housing, services and hospitality.

“We design engaging, emotional, sustainable and contemporary projects,” explains the architect. “Importantly, we design buildings that age well. They will withstand the weather and become more beautiful with time, integrating with the surrounding nature. Architecture is a marathon, not a 100-metre race.”

A project that illustrates PFArchStudio’s approach is Casa do Bosque, which the architect describes as an exercise in the distinction between being in the landscape and being the landscape. “The challenge of designing a house on a densely wooded plot proved far more complex than the apparent absolute freedom that the initial impressions suggested,” says Ferreira.

PFArchStudio: Engaging, sustainable and contemporary architecture

Casa do Bosque is a family home built for permanence, timeless in its nature. A house of quietude that reveals itself slowly among cork oaks and pine trees, with the understated discretion typical of traditional Minho architecture. A house rooted in the sands of former dunes. “The surroundings are not a mere backdrop, but a living, spontaneous, uncontrollable organism – one we had no intention of taming. Nature will conquer the house again,” smiles the architect.

The house consists of an assembly of volumes with distinct functions, a shape that alternately opens up to and closes off from the outdoors. A house of sequence and transition, living from and for its site. And each living space is strategically placed to capture optimal sunlight.

What becomes clear is that PFArchStudio values what is already there, but also the human relations and different layers of thought: “One of our clients said that he liked the idea so much, he felt like it was his own. This is what we do as architects; we step outside ourselves and solve someone else’s problem.”

PFArchStudio: Engaging, sustainable and contemporary architecture