Buildings that hold their quiet.

Casa Travertino sits on a gently sloped plot above the Cascais coastline, its plan folded around a single load-bearing travertine wall that runs the full depth of the house. Every room opens onto it.

The material palette was fixed before the first drawing: travertine, white oak, lime plaster, linen. Nothing else was permitted onto the shortlist, which forced every later decision — hardware, lighting, joinery reveals — into quiet agreement with the first.

Underfloor heating in the travertine keeps the stone warm underfoot through the winter months, a detail the clients now describe as the house’s best-kept secret.

The brief was blunt: the existing house had four disconnected levels and no reason to move between them. We removed the original stair entirely and replaced it with one continuous cast concrete run, lit from a skylight three storeys above.

The stair became the project — every other room was redrawn in relation to it, including a reading landing halfway up that the family now uses more than any of the formal living spaces.

Board-formed concrete was cast in place over eleven weeks; the timber grain from the formwork is still visible in raking afternoon light.

Our client asked for a kitchen that would look better, not worse, after ten years of cooking. Every surface — the island, the splashback, the sink surround — was cut from the same honed limestone, so wear reads as patina rather than damage.

Pale ash cabinetry was left unlacquered and finished only in soap, a Scandinavian technique that keeps the grain matte and pale even as it darkens slightly with handling.

The result took eighteen months from first sketch to final stone polish — most of it spent sourcing a single slab large enough to run the island in one piece.

The clients bought the plot for the trees, not the view, and asked us to design a house that would disturb as few of them as possible. The final footprint touches nine pines; none were removed.

Charred timber cladding — a slow, deliberate reference to the region’s history of controlled forest burns — lets the house recede into the pine trunks by day and glow quietly from within at dusk.

Deep eaves keep the low winter sun on the terrace and the high summer sun off the glazing, without a single mechanical shading device.

A cramped ensuite was combined with an adjoining storage room to make one continuous wet-room, finished floor-to-ceiling in a single pale microcement to remove every grout line from the experience.

A sunken stone bath sits beneath a north-facing skylight; the diffused Copenhagen daylight was, in the end, the reason this project was shortlisted for Dezeen’s Interior of the Year.

Underfloor heating and a discreet drying rail were the only two requests the clients insisted on — everything else was left to us.

A former print works was converted into open-plan studio space for a Copenhagen design agency of forty people, with almost none of the original structure hidden — steel trusses, brick and timber joists were cleaned and left exposed.

Long, uninterrupted sightlines from the entrance to the rear courtyard were a non-negotiable brief item; every partition, meeting pod and storage wall is set back from that single axis.

Acoustic felt panelling, chosen to disappear visually into the ceiling plane, brought reverberation times down to a level the agency’s all-hands meetings had never had before.