Heritage Apartment

In a traditional downtown Lisbon apartment, the heritage is the architecture itself, and everything added to it is a word in a dialogue of rhythm and constraint.

“Heritage Apartment” begins with Pombalino architecture and the logic of its plan. From the entrance hall, tall double doors open from one room onto the next, and the kitchen, the dining room and the living room read as a single sequence, crossed by light from morning to evening. Those proportions set the scale for everything placed inside.

Each room is given a small number of materials with real weight: travertine and walnut in the kitchen, black-stained oak and solid pine in the dining room, burgundy lacquer, velvet and smoked glass in the living room, olive walls with gold mouldings in the bedroom, and in the bathroom aubergine plaster, violet-veined marble and walnut, with a brass-framed mirror. Off the living room, a small room in petrol blue, its wallpaper flecked with copper, slows the sequence before it resumes. All of it sits against plaster, cornices and pine floors that were already there, and the apartment moves from the first room to the last through texture rather than decoration.

In the living room, the Cornaro sofa in burgundy, by Carlo Scarpa, designed in 1973 and produced by Cassina, sets the tone. In the dining room, the Daumiller chair, by Rainer Daumiller for Gubi, is made of solid pine, the same wood as the floor beneath it.

The art follows the same logic. Each piece is chosen for its material and for how it holds a wall that already has mouldings: a ceramic relief by Olivia Cognet in the dining room, Jean-Philippe Duboscq’s torn and folded black gesso in the living room, and in the bedroom a print by Louisiana Bendolph, of the Gee’s Bend quilting community.

The table is laid with the same intent. Costa Nova’s beaded stoneware and Cutipol’s brushed steel sit beside L’Objet’s cut crystal in bordeaux and teal, the one cool note in a warm house. Portuguese craft is set against a contemporary object, as the apartment itself sets new against old.

Nothing here is added to make the house look old, or to make it look new. The architecture holds its position, and the objects are placed to answer it.