Casa do Conto

In March 2009, a week before it was due to open, the building burned. What had been restored as a 19th-century Porto townhouse, with wooden ceilings, original stucco and traditional furniture, was gone. The plaster mouldings of cupids and harps went with it. So did everything the owner had spent years collecting.

Alexandra Coutinho, who is an architect and owned the house, decided to rebuild it as something else entirely. Working with Nuno Grande and the practice pedralíquida, she gutted what was left and recast the interior in raw concrete.

The method is the interesting part. Rather than pour smooth concrete, they used traditional surfaces as moulds: crossed wooden battens, corrugated steel plate, curved plywood. The new concrete therefore carries the texture of the materials that made the old house, which the architects describe as a fossil architecture. The stair, the rear facade, the cubic bathrooms and the oval skylight are all done this way.

Then the ceilings. Alexandra asked six writers and architects who had known the house before the fire to write about it: Filipa Leal, Álvaro Domingues, Jorge Figueira, André Tavares, Pedro Bandeira and Nuno Grande. The studio R2 Design set their texts typographically, and they were cast into the concrete ceilings in bas-relief. You lie in bed and read the account of the building you are lying in.

There are six suites, spare and grey and white, furnished with a mix of design pieces and period furniture salvaged around the city. Tables are topped with azulejos taken off the original exterior. Two suites have kitchenettes. The one on the third floor has a balcony over the rooftops. All have city views, and the house holds art exhibitions and readings.

Breakfast is the only meal served. The address is Rua da Boavista, and the plaque by the door gives the number and then, beneath it, the number the house used to have. Casa da Música is close, Rua Miguel Bombarda and its galleries are a walk away, and the Carolina Michaelis and Lapa metro stops are two minutes off.