What would the transformation of a dilapidated industrial warehouse into a residential design entail? While hardly novel, the approach and response beget distinct directions and results, and most end up sticking to a conventional formula and aesthetic. In an elusive, raw contrast, Fala Atelier devised a surprising, delightfully strange (bordering on prosaic and whimsy) bricolage of spaces, décor, and proportions in their recharting intervention of an expansive, ragged warehouse with shabby office spaces, into the House of Many Faces—a case study in domestic peculiarity through design. The home in the heart of Porto, Portugal, avoids obvious signs of domesticity in its mostly underdone finishing and minimal, unusual décor, its arrangement of spaces as well as its zoning carrying quiet defiance of being labelled a home.

At the onset, one must realise how big the space is—the scale of a warehouse and workspace demands a lengthy intervention to be turned into, and work as a residential space, at least proportionally. Located on a ‘very long,’ narrow plot, the spacious concrete structure was an unlikely contender for a residential conversion, as Fala Atelier affirms—“an oversized house is barely a house... A fearless client aimed at transforming this clutter into a home,” the Porto-based firm shares matter-of-factly.

The clients, a young couple, desired to build their first house in Portugal and relayed their findings of a speculated market to Fala Atelier. They brought something much bigger than necessary to conceive a dwelling, but also significantly cheaper. They tasked the Portuguese architects to simply refurbish the space into an abode that would find itself in the qualities of the original volume.

The structure’s ultra-narrow expression suggested a division into two parts that in due course, pronounced the renovation: a typical façczade that would face the street as ‘an object on its own,’ two levels inside and ‘a disarray of rooms’ would make up the first section, while the sprawling, plaza-sized back part resting under a gable roof supported by heavy wooden beams of the old wooden structure, would form the other. This wooden frame reaches a height of more than seven metres at its highest point, This floor-to-ceiling proportion too, is massive for a one-bedroom setting. The Portuguese architecture was thus conceived as “a series of cuts across the lengthy perimeter,” they explain.

“The project [started] from the need to convert a mono-functional building into something else; to remain big but become domestic; to break it in two main volumes and a garden, but preserve it unitary; to be economical, while full of ambition and richness,” Filipe Magalhães, one of the co-founders of Fala Atelier told STIR. “[Its] name is quite a direct understanding of such a concept,” he adds.

The two parts are now separated by an inner courtyard design, while the building in the front takes in a series of guest rooms, and “dividing the space with a number of slight gestures,” Fala Atelier conveys. The former warehouse now partakes as a massive, main living room (that could easily fit a dozen parked cars, the architects reckon), amusingly interrupted by one curved wall that serves as a room divider. “A proper kitchen and a monumental fireplace are the only hints of uncertain domesticity,” they continue. The end of the main volume hosts private areas of the couple, which, as per Magalhães, are “complex in their form, [and] tense in their scale."

Fala Atelier’s five-year reconstruction involved reassessing and introducing five facets, addressed as ‘a gang of elevations,’ to reorder the extensive area. Each enjoys its distinct persona while sharing apparent similarities. The façade design, quite unobvious at first, gets defined by a grid of black square dots, which helps “make sense of the concrete structures,” as the architects relay. “These are walls that all face and address different public spaces. They are all plastered and white, [and] are visually structured with black dots. They look like a gang, similar, but different from each other,” recaps Magalhães, who heads Fala Atelier with Ana Luisa Soares and Ahmed Belkhodja.

Moreover, recurring pairs of geometric windows, solid yellow doors, green shutters and surfaces of glass bricks enliven and unify the seemingly sparse rooms as motifs, doubling up as peculiar, lively visual bursts within the otherwise (practically) primaeval setting. Together, these devise within the residential architecture, tense, surprising compositions and “charismatic personas. The former warehouse is a house of many faces,” they declare. In its overall use of materials and elements, only the original granite walls and wood structure were retained, while everything else was added new, “one way or another,” Magalhães confirms.

One enters the House of Many Faces from a narrow, noisy street straight into a quaint garden. Others on the street only see the façade. Once in the garden, two interior facades make themselves visible, and Magalhães recalls that “the greenery today is much wilder than it was when the building was finished.”

Fala Atelier’s intervention ascribes the interiors of the House of Many Faces to having ‘uncertain domesticity,’ a strangely evocative way to describe a residence. Magalhães proceeds to elaborate by sharing with STIR, “The space is many things—even a house—but doesn’t look or feel [like] a traditional house. We find that great. It offers a new possibility for the inhabitants to create their own idea of domesticity.”

“As such, the elements we needed to include in our project were treated and developed in the same limbo. They are what they need to be, but also try to be [as] monumental as the space that houses them. Paint, forms, scales, cheap materials and rough executions all come together in the constructive details and objects that suggest domestic uses,” he continues.

The House of Many Faces is a creative, intuitive adaptive reuse project, one that does not shy away from being a little eccentric and might see convention as an afterthought. One of the major factors in this transformation was balancing scales and compositional proportions with residential expectations, and Fala Atelier reigns in that complexity and challenge with carefree nuance, almost irreverently. Here, elements that don’t really go together are placed under one setting of bigness—like new classmates at the start of a school session that end up becoming friends just by virtue of sitting together and finding things in common—in this case, a dwelling that doesn’t try too hard to be one. This results in producing mini-architectures within the home that exist side by side. The house is secure in its many faces, upholding an oddity that slips into whimsy and further into delightful unconvention.

Project Details

Name: House of Many Faces
Location: Porto, Portugal
Architect: Fala Atelier
Design team: Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares, Ahmed Belkhodja, Lera Samovich, Ana Lima, Rute Peixoto, João Carlos Lopes
Project team: Paulo Sousa (engineering), MP+PF (engineering), João Magalhães (landscape), Civiflanco (contractor)