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Lisbon-based architecture firm BUREAU engages in projects across furniture, editorial and design genres, focusing on research-based work that responds to our surrounding physical, cultural and social environments. Always challenging the norms and conventions of our time their latest project seeks to democratise the family home. This one is a little highbrow, so dig out your glasses if you need them and let’s dive in.

Dubbed Maria, the team’s 88 square metre apartment renovation is full of thoughtful surprises. Not wanting to impose prejudices on how to distribute space through the design process, Maria is “just an apartment“, allowing the inhabitants the freedom to dictate how they move around and interact within their own home.

Concerned with the current state of residential design lumping everyone into the same category of the nuclear family, Maria in contrast is a “disconnected physical space waiting to be inhabited in the richest way possible, without prejudices and directed ways of inhabitation”.

Influenced heavily by Shoshana Zuboff’s research on Surveillance Capitalism, BUREAU considers how the accepted notions of housing typologies create limitations for architects and designers to design diverse and flexible spaces for their clients and the constantly evolving “contemporary family”.

Reminding me of John Berger’s book Ways of Seeing, BUREAU is interested in the relationship between what we see and what we know. Considering that when we see, or in this case design a space, we are being influenced by a whole range of assumptions, they sought to create an apartment that is void of the fabricated conventions of what a “household” is. The result is a non-conforming, multi-functional space we can impose our own ideas of domestic bliss onto.

Related: Dodged House in Lisbon, Portugal by Leopold Banchini + Daniel Zamarbide.

The centre of the apartment has a bathroom behind fluted glass, acting as a hub in the middle of the space. On either side of the hub, joinery lines the walls, a generous amount of storage space for a range of needs, clothes, a vacuum cleaner, the skis used that one time on vacation. Pastel tiles in blue, pink and green cover the bathrooms and kitchen island, with family photos propped up against the bathroom vanity.

Framework in the centre of the apartment is repurposed as a sitting or leaning device, akin to a jungle gym in a playground. While the space is mostly open plan, curtains are used to define private and public space.

BUREAU said it best – “a place for an occupant that can potentially always sleep in a couch, live with a dog, cook on the balcony, eat on the floor, read in the bathroom, stand on the kitchen counter“. Truly an evolved apartment, MARIA sets the bar for new kind of contemporary residential living.

Related: Casa do Monte in Lisbon by Leopold Banchini Architects and Daniel Zamarbide.

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