Diamond Houses

“Don't be surprised if while admiring the stones, nooks and charms of the island, you discover a diamond." This was the motto underlying the development of the Diamond Houses project. The diamond! A precious stone among the precious volcanic rocks that sprouted and recreated the Island of Madeira. Polished volumes, with interstitial hollows that create balconies, patios and nooks, that open and close the houses in themselves and make them unique.

The Diamond Houses development comprises five houses that have been conceived as differentiated living spaces. The five houses are intended to be essentially precious diamonds cut to live creatively on small plots, able to offer a unique spatial diversity on the unique island of Madeira.

The development was based on the rules imposed by the allotment operation, which had to be obeyed. Thus, each of the houses was implanted on its own platform, which allows the steep slope of the street leading to the lots to be overcome. These platforms form terraces that climb up the steep street and on which the unique diamonds are set. Houses that are repeated or mirrored, creating hollows, converted into courtyards, cut into the rough block, which in a simple and unique way creates the spatial diversity stratified into three floors. The formatting and large size of plot 1 distinguishes it from the others and has led to a distinct typology. The house located on the top of the plot and facing the magnificent Cabo Girão presents an "L" plan and dialogues with the other houses by the unity of the architectural language, by the use of identical syntax in the elevations that are directly interrelated and with the elevations that can be seen from the street and by the approach in the accessibility to the plot.

And so, the five unique habitable "diamonds" create exterior spaces facing themselves, at the same time appropriating their surroundings, while breathing in and exhaling the landscape through the stones, the nooks and the charms of Madeira Island.