Location: Labruja, Portugal

Design Team: Tiago do Vale Arquitectos

Area: 902 m²

Year: 2025

Photography: João Morgado

Design Features:Cerdeiras House Hotel is located in the Labruja Mountain area of Ponte de Lima, Portugal. Designed by Tiago do Vale Arquitectos, the project transforms an 18th-century rural ensemble into a hotel, working with surviving granite and schist walls, a reconstructed granary, courtyards, terraces, and views toward the Labruja River valley and the nearby Sanctuary of Senhor do Socorro.

Rather than treating the existing fabric as an image to be reproduced, the project reads the house as the result of successive cycles of construction, abandonment, reconstruction, and transformation. Surviving facades and traditional elements are carefully enhanced, while lost structures are rebuilt in a deliberately contemporary way. The intervention therefore refers to the site's building culture without confusing the new work with speculative restoration.

New volumes provide the spatial and performance requirements of the hotel through simplified horizontal forms that remain subordinate to the original stone structures. The former courtyard becomes the social heart of the house, where a vertical spiral-like plane organizes circulation and filters views. Patterned hydraulic tiles and a large skylight preserve the atmosphere of an outdoor patio, drawing daylight, moonlight, and the mountain sky into the interior.

The organization follows the logic of the terraced site. The house, reconstructed granary, new bedroom wing, and granite pool are connected by retaining walls, short flights of stairs, and outdoor platforms. In the granary, the kitchen and dining spaces reinterpret Minho vernacular construction through oak beams, chestnut flooring, handmade tiles, pink marble, and timber screens. The bedrooms are quieter and more direct, allowing the Labruja valley to become the main protagonist of the stay.

Cerdeiras House Hotel is therefore not a static act of preservation, but another episode in the long continuity of a house shaped since 1747. Through a precise relationship between old and new, material memory, and landscape-oriented spatial sequences, the project extends the building's legacy of permanence and transformation into a contemporary hospitality programme.

Design Team:Tiago do Vale Arquitectos is a Braga-based practice founded and led by Portuguese architect Tiago do Vale. Established in 2010, the studio works across architecture, urban rehabilitation, housing, hospitality, cultural programmes, and design, with a particular focus on heritage, construction culture, and the relationship between contemporary architecture and existing contexts.

Tiago do Vale trained at the University of Coimbra and pursued advanced studies in architectural heritage at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto. Alongside built work, he has lectured, written, curated architectural events, and served on international juries. The office's recognitions include ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards, Architizer A+ Awards, Architecture MasterPrize Small Firm of the Year, and Loop Design Awards. The Cerdeiras House Hotel project team includes Tiago do Vale, María Cainzos Osinde, Paula Campos, and an extended group of collaborators.