The Factory and the Courtyard — Casa da Fábrica by Atelier Bugio
Atualizado: 23/10
From the street you would not know it was there. A white wall, a row of saw-tooth gables, a lane that ends.
Then, above the rooftops, a brick chimney. It belonged to a coffee-roasting factory, one of the last workshops to fill the gaps of Arroios, and it now stands at the centre of a courtyard house in the middle of Lisbon, designed by João Favila Menezes and Atelier Bugio.
The neighbourhood was made of clay before it was made of anything else. Rua das Olarias is named for its potteries, and for centuries the clay came down from Monte de São Gens to small kilns on the slope. In the nineteenth century, on Largo do Intendente nearby, António da Costa Lamego's pottery became the Viúva Lamego factory, its façade still covered in the tiles attributed to Ferreira das Tabuletas. Industry kept arriving until the early twentieth century: workshops, warehouses, chimneys squeezed between the old houses.
Favila Menezes, born in Coimbra in 1966 and a professor at the Lisbon Faculty of Architecture, leads a studio founded in Madeira in 1980. In Lisbon, Bugio's best-known work is the kind that makes the city easier to climb: the escalators from Martim Moniz towards the castle, and the funicular from Mouraria up to the Graça viewpoint, a few minutes' walk from here. In 2026 the Portuguese journal AMAG gave the studio its twelfth issue.
The house was not given a garden. It was built around one.
Little was demolished. The patio was sunk one level below the street and left open to the sky, and the chimney rises out of it among a tree, banana palms and a long bench of pink Lioz. Light comes in from above and works its way down: into the bedrooms through deep bays lined in timber, into the living rooms through glass walls that slide away completely, into the spa through narrow light wells.
You enter on the bedroom floor. There are three bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, and in two of them a folded sucupira stair climbs to a mezzanine under the concrete roof, where the gables become skylights. Below is the garden level and the life of the house: a kitchen, a dining room, two long galleries on either side of the courtyard, a living room lined with shelves. Lower still is a spa with a steel plunge pool and a steam room, floored in Lioz.
The palette is short, and nothing in it is there to decorate. Sucupira, a dense Brazilian hardwood that warms to honey, on floors, stairs and slatted walls. Concrete left as it came out of the formwork, the grain of the boards still printed on the ceilings. Terracotta made by hand in the Algarve, laid in herringbone. White tiles from Azulima, and red ones from Viúva Lamego, the factory that began a few streets away. The clay has come back to the neighbourhood.
And then Lioz, the royal stone of Lisbon, the limestone of the Jerónimos Monastery, full of fossil shells some 120 million years old. Some of it turns a soft pink, and that is the stone chosen here, for the basins, the courtyard bench and the floor of the spa. Few materials say Lisbon so plainly.
Restoring an old roastery is mostly a matter of deciding what to keep. Here it was the chimney, the gables and the scale of a place where coffee was once roasted. Everything else, the light, the garden, the quiet, is new. Four hundred and twenty square metres sit behind a front no wider than its neighbours', which is exactly the right manners for Arroios.
Casa da Fábrica is for sale through Wiseguys Properties. See the house — info@wgpadvisors.com
Sources: Metalocus, on Atelier Bugio and João Favila Menezes; AMAG no. 12 (2026), Favila Menezes; ISCTE, on the potteries of Arroios and Monte de São Gens; International Union of Geological Sciences, Lioz as Global Heritage Stone Resource; Atelier Bugio, final drawings, January 2026.