Located in the centre of the village of Benafim, in the municipality of Loulé, this house occupies a deep, irregular plot, characteristic of the consolidated urban fabric of the village. The project starts from a reading of the existing morphology, from the relationship between built mass and interior voids, and reinterprets the courtyard-house typology.

The building is organised longitudinally along the plot, freeing up a wide exterior space that becomes the centre of domestic life. On the ground floor, the architecture dissolves the boundary between interior and exterior: the living room, kitchen and communal areas unfold as a continuous, transparent platform, open to the garden and the pool, where the landscape functions as an extension of the house.

The upper floor reverses this register. A monolithic volume in exposed concrete rests only on the plot's side walls, leaving the ground floor free of supports and generating a wide covered area over the garden. A solid, introspective upper body answers the light, permeable base below: the structure itself embodies this duality between the two floors.

The courtyards exist only on this upper floor: they are cuts that bring light, ventilation and controlled views into the bedrooms, fragmenting the compact volume and reinterpreting the Mediterranean courtyard as a vertical device rather than a horizontal one.

The materiality rests on material honesty. The exposed concrete of the suspended volume is in dialogue with the existing stone walls, extending the village's constructive memory; the transparency of the ground floor, sustained by large glazed surfaces, lets vegetation, water and light enter the composition as design material.

More than an isolated object, the house negotiates with the consolidated fabric of Benafim: the density of the street front on one side, the seclusion of the interior spaces on the other. It is in this tension between openness and intimacy, weight and lightness, that structure, light and void become the project's instruments of composition.