Houses
Casa Noctua
Location
Comporta, Portugal
Typology
Private House
Year
2024
Status
Completed
Area
412 m²
Credits
Design team: Inês Maridor, Tomás Reis, Sigrid Holm · Lighting: Maridor Light · Structure: AFA Consult · Photography: Studio archive
A low house in the pines whose rooms are tuned to the hour after sunset: lime walls, one long clerestory and a terrace lit only from below.
Casa Noctua sits on a sand plateau between pine forest and rice fields, a few kilometres from the Atlantic. The family who commissioned it spend most summer evenings outdoors, and asked for a house that would be at its best after dark.
A house drawn at night
We started with a lighting plan instead of a floor plan. Every room was first sketched as a pool of light — the long kitchen table, the reading niche, the shower open to the sky — and the walls were drawn afterwards to hold those pools in place.
We wanted the house to glow like a lantern left on a table, not like a shop window.
The structure is a single concrete plate on slender steel columns. Below it, lime-washed walls carry warm, indirect light; above it, the roof garden dissolves into the dark. Thirty-one fixtures in total, and not one of them is visible from the garden.
Day / Night
The same building, twelve hours apart.
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