An apartment in Lisbon between past and present

In the Baixa district, the Antonio Costa Lima studio has restored an old building and transformed it into a contemporary home, without forgetting its history.

On the edge of Lisbon’s historic centre is a small neighborhood, the Baixa, built from the ashes of the disastrous earthquake that struck the Portuguese city in 1755. After the unfortunate event, the buildings were rebuilt using a special technique: a wooden reticular skeleton to support walls, floors and roofs.

Today, this building element designed to withstand the stresses of any seismic events, has become an architectural peculiarity to be preserved, as a memory of the history of the country. Antonio Costa Lima Arquitectos, an architectural firm that had to face the renovation of one of the buildings in Baixa, decided to make this particular wooden structure the protagonist of the entire project.The new apartment, created with a meticulous renovation work, is a perfect connection between history and the contemporary way of living. The wooden skeleton dialogues to perfection with materials such as steel in the kitchen or the parquet floor and the courtyards created to bring more light into the rooms. A link underlined by the use of a chromatic palette reduced to two colours: black for the historical elements and white for the new interventions.