Hillgarden

A large site in the centre of Santa Maria da Feira, an area where we had worked before, and a developer willing to take a risk on something other than the usual solutions. That openness is what made the project possible.

The easy answer was available: an L-shaped block facing the street, a garden in the middle, as many units as the site would allow. We turned it down. Instead of densifying, we built three set-back volumes that free the outdoor space and leave air between them. What you gain is not gross floor area — it is the quality of what is left between the buildings.

That space was given a landscape design of its own: a maintenance route around the perimeter, a pool, a communal room, a service room, varied planting. The stone wall that bounded one side of the site was kept and built into the scheme, and is now one of the elements that gives it its character.

The form followed the same principle. Against the received wisdom that balconies cost money and go unused, we designed three-metre balconies, arranged in a geometric interplay that lets the three blocks read as one without making them uniform. Build quality and the choice of materials were above the average for what was on offer at the time.

Commercially the project was a success. The developer has since repeated it as an identity of its own.