Quinta do Vale
Hospitality,
Alentejo,
2024
Scope
Interior architecture, joinery, and FF&E for nine rooms
Surface
1,240 m² across the main house and six outbuildings
Team
Marta Ruiz, Rita Salgado, Tomás Neves
Photography
Miguel Andrade
Completion
June 2024
The brief asked for 12 rooms. The buildings could hold nine, and the difference is what made the place work.
From brief
to handover
Vale is 300 hectares of cork oak an hour east of Évora, with a main house from 1890 and a yard of stores, stables and a dairy that had been shut since 1998. The owners had run their numbers on 12 keys. We walked the yard twice and told them nine, because the tenth would have meant subdividing the dairy, and the dairy is the best room on the estate.
Every wall is 600 millimetres of rubble stone and lime, so we insulated nothing and shaded everything: deep reveals, external shutters in chestnut, and a 9-metre pergola on the west yard that takes the afternoon. Inside it is walnut and unglazed terracotta. The kitchen stays open to guests, because on a farm nobody stays out of the kitchen.
The dairy, the room that cost us three keys
Kitchen, open to guests because nobody stays out
Guest room wall, 600 millimetres of rubble stone
Sitting room in the old stables, walnut and lime
Materials
used
Chestnut
External shutters, on every opening
Unglazed terracotta
Floors through the nine rooms
Lime plaster
Over 600 millimetres of rubble stone behind it
Hospitality,
Alentejo
“They talked us out of three rooms, and the place is fuller than it would have been.”
Joana Pais Vaz, Quinta do Vale