House of Tales House of Tales
liquid stone

Tale House
Work: Porto 2008-2011
Project: Liquid Stone | Alexandra Grande, Joana Couceiro
João Crisóstomo, Luís Sobral
Design: R2
Texts: Álvaro Domingues, André Tavares, Filipa Leal
Jorge Figueira, Pedro Bandeira, Nuno Grande

“It was 513, now it’s forever”

The first reconstruction proposal intended to recover the memory of the late 19th century bourgeois house. XIX: the halls with high ceilings, thematic plaster ceilings, the central staircase, a sculptural object in old Riga with turned wooden balustrades and bobbins, still the solemnity of the stucco and marbled, of the shutters and the high skirting boards…
One hundred years later, without touching the essentials, the house, restored and surgically adapted, would open to the public as a guest house.

It had a brief life.

Today, after the brutal fire that prevented her from living that life, we want to restore her character and rebuild an essential version of her story.

It will be a fossil architecture, solid as concrete and open to the public with the same dreams.
The door of nº703 reads “it was 513” and it will be 703 again, with the same facade and the same iron-handled door, which persists in giving back to the city its memories.