Location: Porto, Portugal

Design Team: fala

Area: 120 m²

Year: 2025

Photography: Francisco Ascensão, Rory Gardiner, Giulietta Margot, Lera Samovich

Design Features: House Around a Column occupies a skewed 60 m² plot embedded in Porto's dense urban fabric. Rather than treating the constraint as a sequence of defensive compromises, fala stacks a 120 m² dwelling across three levels and makes the vertical dimension its principal resource. Light enters through narrow street and rear elevations, while floor openings, stairs and offset rooms maintain long internal sightlines.

The street facade establishes a strict field of black-and-white striped marble. An oversized opening spans two storeys, making the three-level house read as one complete and slightly deceptive urban face. Green frames and a yellow triangular metal element emerge from the stripes as shading, protection and the first geometric signals of the interior. At the rear, a much narrower elevation compresses the same language into a striped cornice and semicircular rail at domestic scale.

The centre of the house is not one isolated column but a vertically superimposed family of supports. Cylindrical, octagonal and square sections change from floor to floor while remaining on one axis. Set beside the stair and voids, they are structural elements and a continuous marker. Moving through the house never reveals the complete column at once; each partial shape adjusts the visitor's reading of the spatial centre.

The stair is treated as an interior sculpture crossing every level. White mesh balustrades, timber treads, black marble landings and a semicircular metal guard interlock around the void. Floor edges become elements to look up at, look down from and move around. A compressed entrance level, an expanded principal living floor and an upper room linked visually across the void give the compact house a depth beyond its measured area.

On the main living level, kitchen, stair and terrace are compressed into one continuous scene. A triangular kitchen follows the irregular boundary; white cabinetry and a green volume gather around the central support, while striped timber flooring stitches the parts together. Yellow triangles, pink circles and green squares become screens, handles, rails or cabinet pieces, allowing abstract geometry to perform practical acts of opening, touching, protecting and guiding.

Materials balance precision with everyday occupation. Black-and-white marble gives the outer shell and stair junctions an almost monumental presence; glass blocks filter side light into a soft field; timber flooring restores domestic warmth; perforated metal and mesh preserve views between levels. fala turns the tight site, irregular edges and limited light into a spatial play of columns, stripes and geometric fragments—graphic enough to feel theatrical, yet open to the disorder and change of daily life.

Design Team: fala is an architecture practice based in Porto and Lausanne. Founded in 2013, it is led by Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luísa Soares, Ahmed Belkhodja and Lera Samovich, together with Ana Lima, João Carlos Lopes and João Baptista. Across houses, public work, exhibitions and research, the practice uses clear geometry, vivid colour and carefully reconsidered everyday elements to hold strict order and productive imbalance together.

House Around a Column was developed by Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luísa Soares, Ahmed Belkhodja, Lera Samovich, Joana Sendas and João Carlos Lopes of fala, with landscape by POMO, engineering by MP+PF and construction by Calipa. The tiny skewed parcel becomes a vertical narrative coordinated through columns, stairs, furniture and facade patterns.