ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN

Why concrete?

Concrete was chosen because it delivers what the Alentejo demands of a permanent house: structural longevity, geometric precision and a mineral surface that weathers rather than degrades.

The construction system is reinforced concrete cast in situ using metal formwork (banches). The walls are structural concrete, and the metal formwork gives them high geometric precision — clean lines and true surfaces achieved in the pour itself, not applied afterwards. The buildings stand on continuous reinforced-concrete foundations sized to the geotechnical conditions of the site.

The façades are where the choice becomes visible. They are finished in exposed concrete with a "deactivated" (washed) surface, pigmented with sand: the outer layer is washed to reveal the aggregate, producing a durable mineral texture with high resistance to weather. The colour is not painted on but bound into the material, so the façades are made from the palette of the site — sand into concrete — and require no coating that will peel, fade or need renewal. A concrete façade of this kind ages the way stone does.

Concrete also serves the estate's design language. Apaulinha's material palette is deliberately restricted — sand, concrete, wood, light, silence — and exposed structural concrete allows the building's surface, structure and expression to be one and the same thing. Against it, the wooden exterior joinery, contemporary in design and treated for the local climate, provides the warm counterpoint; inside, walls are finished in hydraulic lime, a breathable mineral render.

The system is matched to the builder. Fábrica Policronica, the group's own construction company, casts and controls the work directly, with its own equipment and its own industrial production facility in Rio Maior — a level of control over a demanding material that a chain of subcontractors rarely achieves.

Why it matters: concrete of this quality is a decision about time. It produces homes that are precise on the day of delivery and substantially unchanged decades later, with minimal maintenance of the envelope — one of the foundations of the estate's long-term value.