The lot appeared at the opportunities to buy, “but it was a true Bermuda triangle”: 45 square meters of triangular shape, with the ruin of a house with walls so thick that there was almost no room for anything else. “It was 2011, in the midst of crisis, Tania was pregnant with our first daughter and had just been fired. Everything was going wrong, but we bought the land”, recalls Luís Pedro Pinto. “We didn’t have the money to build the house, but we brought our parents here and made regular visits to ruin,” then in a kind of break, like the country. Friends and family “took their hands to their heads, said it was impossible, by the limitations of the terrain, to do whatever it was, and they didn’t understand.” Meanwhile, the architect played a game of patience and imagined what would be the family home seven years later.
The works began in 2016, “when things began to improve”, and the couple of architects moved into the single-family building in 2018, already with two daughters. Behind was an apartment in a 12-story building in Olivais, with 52 families. A new scale, in a more traditional neighborhood of Lisbon, and a name – Triangular House – that was born from the great challenge of taming vertices and enhancing the area.
“As the land had only 45 square meters of implantation, there was the initial idea of making the house by slices,” says the architect, “and also separate the zones” into three floors: a first entrance area to work, a second social floor, another for the rooms, and even a terrace with a privileged sun exposure and river views, a total of 140 square meters of useful area, 180,000 euros in construction.