Cerdeiras House Hotel / Tiago Do Vale Architects

Architects: Tiago do Vale Architects
Area: 902 m² / 9,710 ft²
Year: 2021–2025
Photography: João Morgado
Lead Architects: Tiago do Vale, María Cainzos Osinde, Paula Campos
Architects Team: Maria João Araújo, Louane Papin, Nil Kokulu, Margarida Bogas, Clementina Silva, Adriana Gomes, Hugo Quintela, Joanna Jakimiuk, Kamila Legat, Adele Pinna, Laetitia Alves, Thuy Thu Nguyen, Camille Martin, Eva Amor, Karolina Zuba, Priscilla Moreira, Núria Gonzalez, Coraline Pothin, Florisa Novo Rodrigues, Riddhi Varma, Teresa Vilar, Dora Troha, Alara Çağla, Marija Matozan, Anabela Couto, Jan Momot, Nona Stoycheva, Carola Calogiuri, Saša Alekseja Kristavčnik, Naomi Fonseca
Contractor: Vodul – Sociedade de Construções Civis L.da
Structural Engineering: CIPC L.da; Sprenplan L.da
Client: Montenegro & Fiuza L.da, Capim Limão Country House
Location: Labruja, Ponte de Lima
Country: Portugal

Cerdeiras House Hotel in Ponte de Lima, Portugal, converts a rural estate with origins in 1747 into a hospitality project shaped by rehabilitation, reconstruction, and contemporary addition. Designed by Atelier Tiago do Vale, Architects, the project preserves surviving granite and schist façades while introducing new volumes that support the hotel program without overwhelming the historic fabric. The intervention restores the legibility of the original house, reconstructs the partially lost granary, and organizes new guest and service areas around the terrain’s existing walls and terraces. Its architectural approach is based on distinction rather than imitation, allowing historic elements, reconstructed components, and contemporary insertions to remain clearly identifiable. The program includes social rooms, guest accommodation, service spaces, a kitchen, dining areas, outdoor patios, a granite swimming pool, and a small auditorium oriented toward the Labruja valley. Through this layered strategy, the project extends the site’s long history of adaptation while preserving its rural character.

In the Cerdeiras House Hotel, materiality is not only a question of atmosphere; it is almost the structure of the narrative. Materiality shaped the project by giving continuity to different times. It allowed the hotel to become another chapter in the history of the house rather than a break from it.
Interview with Tiago do Vale Tiago do Vale Architects

Cerdeiras house hotel / tiago do vale architects

Cerdeiras House Hotel approaches heritage as a living condition rather than a static image, using the accumulated irregularities of the site as the foundation for a new hospitality experience. The project’s architectural value lies in how it accepts incompleteness, reading the existing buildings not as a finished monument but as a rural ensemble shaped by use, expansion, abandonment, and repair. Instead of reducing the house to a single historical period, Atelier Tiago do Vale, Architects developed an intervention that makes each phase of the property’s evolution visible.

Located near the Sanctuary of Senhor do Socorro, on the slopes of the Labruja Mountain Range, the hotel occupies a setting defined by pilgrimage routes, agricultural memory, and the landscape of Alto Minho. The pre-existing house retained fragments of granite and schist façades, along with traces of construction campaigns that had altered its form over time. These surviving elements guided the design, establishing the material and spatial framework for a project that balances continuity with transformation.

The rehabilitation strategy distinguishes between preservation, reconstruction, and new construction. Traditional elements such as skirtings, roof coverings, window frames, and shutters were reintroduced in a simplified manner, where they reinforced the reading of the old façades. The partially lost granary was reconstructed as a recognizable component of the ensemble, while the new additions were given a contemporary and deliberately restrained expression. Their low, horizontal profiles allow the older structures to retain visual prominence across the site.

The organization of the complex follows the logic of the existing terrain, retaining walls, terraces, and outbuildings. A renewed connection between the house and granary is established along a pre-existing wall, while additional links extend toward the new bedroom wing. The former courtyard becomes part of the hotel’s interior sequence as the main living room, transforming an exterior threshold into a central social space. Behind granite retaining walls, service and guest areas are carefully embedded into the slope, maintaining the rural scale of the property.

Arrival is choreographed through the old courtyard gate, where a large opening is reinterpreted with a more domestic character. References to Alto Minho vernacular architecture appear through window side seats, timber slatting associated with traditional granaries, and copper sulfate pigmented paints. These details are not treated as decorative nostalgia, but as measured translations of regional building culture into a contemporary architectural vocabulary.

Inside, a vertical spiral plane organizes circulation and frames views through the building. The central room recalls the atmosphere of an outdoor patio through patterned hydraulic tiles and a large skylight, allowing the memory of the courtyard to remain present within the renewed interior. The hotel’s social spaces occupy the ground floor of the pre-existing house and include living, dining, and winter rooms, along with an accessible bedroom, laundry, wine cellar, and bathroom.

The reconstructed granary accommodates the kitchen on the ground floor, where regional domestic references are translated through cupboards, pink marble, and handmade tiles. On the upper level, a dining area opens southward toward the valley behind a slatted timber screen that filters light and views while reducing solar gain. The reconstruction uses oak beams and joists supporting a chestnut floor, while the roof adapts traditional construction logic to contemporary requirements for insulation and waterproofing.

Guest accommodation is arranged across the upper levels of the historic house and the new bedroom wing. Within the existing house, a large suite and two bedrooms are placed behind the preserved façades, where high skirtings, timber frames, and shutters reinforce the connection to local domestic typologies. Contemporary details, including recessed minimal skirtings in new partitions, distinguish recent work from older fabric without disrupting the overall coherence of the interiors.

Between the house terraces and the granite swimming pool, a small auditorium forms a place for gathering and contemplation, extending the hospitality program into the open landscape. An outdoor patio framing an olive tree acts as a transitional point between the historic house, the granary dining space, and the new accommodation wing. These exterior rooms reinforce the project’s relationship with the valley and preserve the sense of a rural compound assembled over time.

Cerdeiras House Hotel demonstrates how adaptive reuse can preserve historical depth without resorting to imitation. Its significance rests in the clarity of its architectural distinctions: original fabric is conserved where possible, lost elements are reconstructed with restraint, and new work is introduced with quiet precision. Through this approach, the project continues the property’s long process of transformation while giving it a renewed public and cultural role.