Interior architecture · Lisboa · est. 2011
A room is photographed once and lived in eleven thousand times. We build for the eleven thousand — the 6:40 light on the bedroom wall, the four o'clock glare off a floor, the lamp you actually reach for at ten.
South-west, so it gets the last four hours of the day and all of the heat with them. Burnished lime plaster to hold that light without glare, oiled oak underfoot, and a sofa low enough to see the garden over.
Working light is even light. We took the window up to the ceiling, removed every upper cabinet, and let honed travertine do the bouncing. The brass will go brown within a year. That is the point of it.
East-facing, which most people treat as a problem. We gave the sun a deep plaster wall to land on at 6:40 and let it give the light back, softened, for the rest of the morning. Wool, linen, and nothing shiny.
Top-lit through a single slot cut on the meridian, so the room is washed rather than spotted. Tadelakt to the ceiling, one slab of stone, and deliberately no mirror facing the opening — you should never be backlit while you shave.
A sample board under a showroom downlight tells you almost nothing. Every surface here is lit by a single raking light you control — drag left or right and watch what the weave, the grain and the vein actually do when the sun gets low.
Rake angle 312° Sample Lime plaster Relief 0.6 mm Procedurally generated — no photography on this page
Two rooms and a corridor, tiled throughout in a grey porcelain that killed the west light. Everything heavy was pushed against the one wall that could have taken glazing.
One wall removed, the floor dropped two steps to meet the terrace, and the window given a structural job instead of a decorative one. Nothing was added that does not hold light or hold weight.
Every brief we are given describes a floor plan. Every brief we write describes a day. Before anything is drawn we spend a week in the building with a light meter and a notebook, and we come back with the hours that matter to you — not the ones that matter to a camera.
Almost every room we are called to has too much in it, and the excess is usually structural. A wall built in 1974 to make two saleable bedrooms. A dropped ceiling hiding a duct that was decommissioned in 1998. We find the subtraction first, because it is free and it is always the biggest move.
We do not specify a finish that only looks correct on the day it is installed. Unlacquered brass goes brown. Oiled oak darkens where the sun lands and stays pale under the rug. Lime plaster takes a knock and heals grey. If a surface cannot age in public, it does not go in.
A room is judged in daylight and lived in after dark. We draw the artificial scheme before the daylight one — where the pools of light fall, what you can read by, what stays off. Nothing above 2700 K goes into a room you sleep in, and no ceiling downlight has ever left this studio.
They spent the whole first meeting asking what time I get home. I thought I was being sold something. I was being measured.
I asked for more storage. They gave me less of it, in the right place, and I have not lost a single thing since we moved back in.
The kitchen faces north and it is the brightest room in the house. Two years on I still don't entirely understand how they did that.
Meridian House takes four projects a year, and we begin them in the season they will be finished in. If you have a room that only works for two hours a day, tell us which two.