Hasta La Ideas

Portuguese studio Aires Mateus has transformed a house in Portugal into a bright white building with a sprawling extension (+ slideshow).

The three-storey house is located in Alcobaça, a Portuguese city dominated by the presence of a twelfth century monastery, and it occupies a large irregularly shaped site on the edge of the river Dull.

Aires Mateus upgraded and extended an existing residence and made every surface inside and outside of the house white, allowing it stand out amongst the brown and pink tones of the surrounding local architecture.

The new windows appear as narrow vertical slices. Some of them overlap the white-painted frames that housed the windows before the renovation and each one is sunken into a deep recess, revealing the thickness of the exterior walls.

Residents enter the house on the middle floor, where a staircase leads up and down towards either a top floor mezzanine or a lower floor living room.

A curved skylight punctures the roof overhead and projects a teardrop-shaped splash of light onto the walls of the stairwell.

Another curved opening leads from the living room to the rooms of the expansive extension, where a kitchen, a dining room and three bedrooms are spaced out around a series of small square courtyards.

Storage closets are contained inside each of the thick walls that separate the rooms.

The L-shaped garden wraps around the edge of the house and is bounded by the chunky white perimeter walls.

Aires Mateus is a Lisbon-based architectural studio led by Manual and Francisco Aires Mateus. Past projects include a nursing home in Alcácer do Sal and houses with sandy floors that were exhibited for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010.

See more Portuguese houses on Dezeen, including a house in Lisbon with bushy plants on its facade.

See more architecture in Portugal »

Photography is by Fernando Guerra.

Above: lower ground floor plan – click above for larger image

Above: upper ground floor plan – click above for larger image

Above: top floor plan – click above for larger image

Above: cross section – click above for larger image

Above: long section – click above for larger image

Above: rear elevation – click above for larger image

The post House in Alcobaça
by Aires Mateus appeared first on Dezeen.

With this table, we proudly present a design studio and office desk. It comes with a wealth of first class details, perfect processing and convincing ..

Walking and texting is challenging enough as it is… but walking with my morning coffee and texting is damn near impossible if not dangerous! The Uppercup is the first cupholder designed just for iPhone – perfect for fanboys who love their coffee too. Ok… so maybe it’s not a practical solution to any real problem, but it’s definitely a clever statement about the flood of wild iPhone accessories on the market.

Designer: NATWERK

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Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
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(Oh No They Di’nt! was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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Who hasn’t dreamt of laying on the clouds?! This playful seating collection called Cirrus brings the fluffy stuff indoors in a whimsical series of gentle sofas and lounges. As comfortable as they look, each piece is composed with a rigid OSB frame and sinuous spring system in the seat and back surrounded by flexible PUR foam so it keeps shape without sacrificing comfort.

Designer: Dizajno

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Yanko Design
Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
Yanko Design Store – We are about more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the YD Store!
(Daydream in the Clouds was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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1. Flaming Auto Daydream
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In the world of tech design, bigger seems to be better. The more people you can reach, the more you can broadcast, the more successful your app. And yet the root of the mobile phone—or the phone more generally—has always been about one-on-one conversation. It was relatively recently that we could send a blast to more than a few people at a time through apps like Twitter and Foursquare.

Which is why I was intrigued by a recent piece from Jenna Wortham in the New York Times noting what’s happened now that our mobile experiences have scaled:

As these media have matured and more of our colleagues, former flings, in-laws and friends have migrated to them, our use of them has changed. We’ve become better at choreographing ourselves and showing our best sides to the screen, capturing the most flattering angle of our faces, our homes, our evenings out, our loved ones and our trips.

Dubbing this experience “success theater,” she goes on to note apps that are designed for more intimacy, like Snapchat or Facebook Poke. After years of being encouraged to gather as many followers and friends as possible, many users are swinging in the opposite direction.

Which got me thinking about two apps that have picked up steam as of late. Both of them—WhatsApp and WeChat—focus on simple sharing for small groups or individuals. You could call them, reductively, complex SMS systems, but what they allow is much broader. From sharing videos and pics to even voice memos, they make facilitate one-on-one exchanges between friends, rather than blasts and curated photos designed for public consumption. The ability to create small groups means that circles of friends can easily chat and share ideas, with all the multimedia features of a Twitter or Facebook and none of the pressure to perform.

WhatsApp seems to be more popular with my American, European and African friends, whereas WeChat, developed by China’s Tencent, is clearly dominant in China, and perhaps other parts of Asia. It’s not a surprise to me that they’ve caught on, and I suspect more and more apps like them will start popping up. If the latter decade was focused on scaling up social media and watching sites like Facebook enter the mainstream, maybe this decade is about designing for intimacy, designing for the social experiences we want to share just with a handful of friends.

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