Portuguese Houses With History

ANA ANAHORY E FELIPA ALMEIDA

 

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For almost a decade Ana Anahory and I had an interior design studio which gave us a unique opportunity to discover and visit Portuguese family houses, with stories and beauty that deserved to be portrayed.

Since our time with the studio, Portugal has seen a growth in tourism and many of these houses have been transformed into hotels, vacation rentals, and rural accommodation as it became too expensive to maintain them as family homes. This development has led to a negative side-effect: a certain loss of the character that made them so unique and a patina of ‘memory’ that was so prevalent in some homes. Witnessing this, made us feel the need to make a book about the places that have resisted this change.

Although we no longer work together, our shared passion for these houses and their unrepeatable identity was more than enough to convince us to join forces once more. We carefully photographed fifteen properties we found to ensure that there was a visual memory that would not be lost.

To guide the choice of houses that we would include in this collection we felt it was important to define some criteria. The first and most crucial detail, would be that they are still inhabited.

We invited the talented Birgit Sfat to be the photographer for her obvious sensitivity towards her subjects. We then reached out to the historian Filipa Avellar to help us contextualise these houses within a Portuguese aesthetic and architectural tradition. Her experience with the inventory of Architectural Heritage made her the ideal scholar for this project.

Almost every day we watch with great sadness the disappearance of pieces of our identity, in part possibly due to a lack of interest or ignorance about the real value of these buildings. This book pays homage to a memory, a Portuguese way of being and a cultural identity that is disappearing with the massification of design, objects and furniture. We hope it raises awareness to what we feel is most valuable about these homes: that heritage is precious, that it is part of our history and must be preserved.

 

PORTUGUESE HOUSES WITH HISTORY

Language: English
ISBN: 9781961856660
Publisher: ORO Editions
Binding: Hardback
Size: 29,7 x 21 cm
Pages: 200
Image: 150 color
Pre-order price: 54,75€