Residential · Évora, Portugal · 2023
Vale House
Rammed earth walls and a single glass slot cut through the Portuguese plain.
Vale House sits in an almost featureless landscape—a flat expanse of cork oaks and golden grasses stretching to a horizon that seems impossibly far away. The building responds to this emptiness not by asserting itself, but by disappearing into it.
Three rammed-earth walls—each 600mm thick, cast with the site's own soil mixed with local limestone aggregate—extend from the ground as natural extensions of the terrain. The roof, a single plane of Cor-Ten steel, floats above them on knife-thin steel mullions, leaving a 200mm glass slot that runs the full 24-metre length of the building.
This gap is the building's defining feature. In morning, a blade of light traverses the interior floor over four hours, marking time with architectural precision.
Materials
- —Rammed earth (site-sourced)
- —Cor-Ten steel
- —Structural glass
Awards
- ✦ Dezeen Award 2023 — House of the Year
— Story
The Journey of Vale House
The commission came from a Portuguese writer and her Dutch partner, both seeking a place where they could work in solitude while remaining connected to the raw beauty of the Alentejo region. Their brief was deceptively simple: "We want to live inside the landscape, not on top of it."
The site itself told us what to do. A gentle slope, ancient cork trees, and that endless horizon. The soil—rich with iron oxide—had the perfect color and composition for rammed earth construction. We spent weeks testing different mixtures, adding local limestone and water until we achieved the precise strength and color that would allow the walls to emerge naturally from the ground.
The design process became an exercise in subtraction. What could we remove while still creating a home? The answer led us to three parallel walls that define space without enclosing it. Between these earth masses, we carved a single continuous space that flows from living to working to sleeping areas, each marked only by subtle changes in floor level and light quality.
The glass slot—just 200mm wide—became the project's soul. It's not a window but a temporal instrument. Throughout the day, it tracks the sun's journey across the sky, casting moving shadows that serve as an organic clock. In winter, the low sun penetrates deep into the interior, providing passive heating. In summer, the high sun passes overhead, keeping the space cool.
Building with rammed earth taught us patience. Each layer had to be compacted at the right moisture content, allowed to cure, then tested before the next could be added. The walls rose slowly over months, each course bearing the fingerprints of local builders who had worked with this material for generations.
The result is a house that feels both ancient and contemporary. It doesn't compete with the landscape; it completes it. Our clients tell us that living there has changed their relationship with time itself. They no longer check their watches—they watch the light move across the floor, listen to the wind through the cork trees, and feel the seasons change through the thick earth walls that surround them. The house has become not just a shelter, but a way of measuring life by natural rhythms rather than artificial ones.
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