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Innovative Ideas from Aires Mateus Arquitectos

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This stunningly original use of sand as carpeting – in what seems like an attic cottage – is from the innovative Portuguese studio Aires Mateus Arquitectos.

In fact, it is not an attic, but the cottage is part of Casa Areia is one of three cottages for beachside accommodations.

The living room/kitchen cottage has been lightly built on a beach, and simply allows all the sand to continue from outside to inside.

The two bedroom/bathroom cottages have traditional floors – so you are not sleeping with sandy feet.

In another work, the studio employs the ubiquitous strips seen everywhere now – but in such a novel way it is as if it is the first time you’ve seen it. Not only the walls are screened – but even the floor.

Here a wind break around a swimming pool invites the sky in larger chunks as a pattern generated by blocky cutouts.

In a recent work, in Leira, Portugal, a windowless house appears like the tip of an iceberg showing above ground level.

The house itself is under ground.

It gets more than enough daylight from a central courtyard opening in the ground, as well as through the giant skylight in the roof.

For this Housing for the Elderly in Alcácer do Sal, Aires Mateus Arquitectos offer a respite from village life for those gradually relocating from this life to the hereafter, in yet another creative way.

They say we are alone in death, and each bedroom in this retirement home is isolated and removed from the village it is set in.

Yet all the isolated dwellings are connected in a whole: a shared future.

From a distance it has the blocky uniformity of a cemetery.