Portuguese studio Fala Atelier’s Cookie Cutter Retreat brings a private house, shared dwelling and adaptable hall into a sloping site at Sobral de Monte Agraço. The three buildings repeat a semicircular shape at different scales. Diagonal walls separate compact rooms from open communal space, while grass roofs and bright blue chimneys shape the relationship with the landscape.
Portuguese architecture studio Fala Atelier arranged Cookie Cutter Retreat as three semicircular buildings in Sobral de Monte Agraço, Portugal. A private house, a shared dwelling and an adaptable hall occupy different positions on the sloping site. The buildings repeat the same geometry at small, medium and large scales, using a shared material vocabulary and dimensional ratios. Parts of their concrete frames are embedded in the hillside.[1], [2]
A diagonal wall cuts through each volume, separating a dense group of small rooms from a broad open space. In the largest building, the hall, communal activity occupies the front while private rooms sit behind. The studio said some internal arrangements borrow formal relationships from houses by Frank Gehry, Toyo Ito and Alvaro Siza. The three buildings keep their shared outer geometry while accommodating different uses.[1]
Grass roofs continue the slope over the buildings, with block-shaped bright blue chimneys marking them from a distance. Round concrete columns, glazed fronts and tilted metal canopies form the thresholds to the landscape. White-painted surfaces and tiled walls repeat across the private and shared houses and the hall, with blue and fluorescent-yellow details. Fala described a loose relationship between the volumes and the land rather than a rigid overall composition.[1]
