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Raw Culture Arts & Lofts Bairro Alto
Lisbon, Portugal · Independent · Accessible Luxury
The Casa Portuguesa printworks made newspapers in this Bairro Alto building and then sat shut for more than thirty years, until Jose Oliveira, who runs an IT company and had six warehouses of art nobody ever saw, bought it. Pedra Liquida drove a new circular staircase up through the old vaulted floors, kept the iron beams, and left the grey facade as blank as it found it. Thirteen lofts opened on 28 December 2017, hung with Oliveira's collection, and everything in your room is for sale.
- 13 rooms
- Opened 2017
- Neighborhood: Bairro Alto
- Architect: Pedra Liquida
About Raw Culture Arts & Lofts Bairro Alto
- Prices on the walls and floors run from a 1,200 euro Mazzega glass lamp to a 7,500 euro Hans Wegner living-room set. If you like what is in your loft, you can buy it and take it home.
- The partitions between apartments were built from modular metal sections on purpose, to echo the ironwork the printing presses left behind in the building.
- Each loft is named after an urban material, Brick and Steel among them, and no two are alike in layout or contents.
- The top floors step back so that the crowning penthouse cannot be seen from either of the two streets the building fronts.
History
The building is what architects call a palimpsest. Its core is a seventeenth-century palatial structure squeezed between two streets in the dense grid of Bairro Alto, but for most of its useful life it was industrial: the Casa Portuguesa printing house operated here, turning out daily newspapers, and the work forced round after round of alteration through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Then it closed and stayed closed for more than three decades.
Jose Oliveira, a Lisbon businessman who runs the IT firm BI4ALL, had wanted to get into hotels for years and had a second problem: six warehouses full of a private art and design collection that nobody ever saw. A friend mentioned a shuttered typography on Rua das Gaveas over lunch. Oliveira found the owners, bought the building, and began work in March 2015.
The architects at Pedra Liquida treated the accumulated alterations as material rather than mess. A new central structure of metal profiles was driven through the existing floors, completing the vault slabs and iron and timber beams already there. The original staircase was replaced with a circular one, deliberately intrusive and autonomous, topped with a skylight that lights and ventilates the core. Partitions between the apartments were made from modular metal elements to carry on the industrial spirit. The limestone masonry facades kept the rhythm and size of their old openings, cornices and pilasters, and the upper floors were set back so the penthouse is invisible from the street. Thirteen units resulted, twelve lofts and a penthouse, plus a bar-cafe and a gallery on the ground floor, and the first guests arrived on 28 December 2017. Every loft is furnished from Oliveira's collection, and every piece is for sale.
The setting
Rua das Gaveas runs through the middle of Bairro Alto, the sixteenth-century grid on the hill above Chiado that is Lisbon's oldest nightlife district and one of the few central quarters that people still actually live in. The pattern here is famous: shuttered and residential by day, then bars, fado houses and people in the street by night. Street art is everywhere, the hilltop viewpoints are minutes away, and Chiado's bookshops, theatres and the Sao Carlos opera house are a short walk downhill. The building's grey facade is unassuming enough that most people walk straight past it, which is part of the appeal; from the outside there is no sign that a gallery and thirteen art-filled lofts are behind it.
Experiences
- Art Gallery moments of artistic creation — Quarterly moments of artistic creation where artists present artworks or performances; guests encounter them unannounced.
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