Portuguese Houses with History

Words by Ana Anahory & Felipa Almeida

For almost a decade we had an interior design studio which gave us a unique opportunity to discover and visit Portuguese family houses, with stories and beauty that deserved to be portrayed. Since then, time has passed and with the growth of tourism in our country, many of these houses ended up being transformed into hotels, vacation rentals, airbnb’s and rural hotels, as it was too expensive to keep them just as family homes. Watching this made us feel the need to make a book about the ones that still resist. Our shared passion for these houses and their unrepeatable identity convinced us that this could be a project where we could work together again, photographing the properties that we still managed to find so that at least their visual memory didn’t get lost. We want this book to pay homage to a memory, a Portuguese savoir-faire and taste that is disappearing with the massification of design, objects and furniture. We hope that this book will help raise awareness to what we feel is most valuable about these homes: the notion that this heritage is precious, that it is part of our history and must be preserved.