The light at five o’clock

There is an hour on this coast, between five and six from April to September, when the sun comes in so low across the water that it stops lighting the ground and starts lighting the undersides of things. The reed roof goes gold from below. The limestone, which is grey at noon, turns the colour of the inside of a loaf. Everything vertical throws a shadow twelve times its own height, and the dune, which for most of the day is a flat pale nothing, becomes a landscape with ridges and hollows in it.

We have never designed a house around a view. We have designed all of them around that hour.

The number is two metres forty

Every house at Casa das Dunas has the same section: a limestone wall three metres eighty high, and a reed roof that runs two metres forty past it. The overhang is not a stylistic decision, though people assume it is. It is the shadow line for 21 June at half past one, when the sun here stands at 74°. At that angle a 2.40 m overhang puts the whole glass wall in shade and keeps the terrace floor cool enough to walk on barefoot.

At five in the afternoon in June the sun is at 26°. At six it is at 14°. At those angles the same overhang does nothing at all: the light comes straight under it, crosses the terrace, crosses the glass, and reaches the back wall of the living room fourteen metres in. For about ninety minutes the house is full of horizontal light, and then it is over.

Rita Bastos, who drew the section, calls the overhang a sundial, and she is right in a way that took me two summers to see. A roof that shades everything is not generous, it is merely defensive. The good ones are tuned: they take away the part of the day you do not want and hand back the part you do.

Why west, and not south

Portuguese houses face south. It is the sensible orientation, it is what the building regulations reward, and on this coast it is wrong. Face south and you get an even, dull, useful light all day and nothing at all in the evening, because the sun goes down behind your right shoulder into the pines.

Face west, into the Atlantic, and you accept two problems: the afternoon heat in August, which the overhang solves, and the glare at the horizon, which a terrace with something on it — a wall, a pergola, a pine — solves for you. What you get back is the only hour of the day when nobody is anywhere else. In the eleven houses at Carvalhal that we finished in 2016, the terrace is the most-used room in nine of them, by a margin the owners find slightly embarrassing.

So: the terrace is the width of the house, never a corner of it. It is the same floor as the living room, with no step, because a step turns a room into a balcony. It is deep enough for a table for eight — four metres, not three — and the roof over it is the house’s roof, not a separate thing added later. And it faces the water, whatever the plot geometry costs us. On plot 08 we turned the whole house nine degrees off the plot boundary to do it. The boundary is a legal fiction. Five o’clock is not.

What we learned at the Sado

The estuary faces north-west, and the light there is different: silver rather than gold, and it lasts longer because it comes off the water twice, once direct and once reflected off the flats at low tide. The villas there have a lower, wider overhang — one metre eighty — and a terrace that steps down in two levels rather than one, because the light arrives almost horizontally and a single plane of it is too much.

At Melides, where the houses stand on posts above the sand, the deck is a metre and a half up and the light gets under the house as well as into it. In the evening the whole underside of the floor glows, and the grass beneath goes the colour of wheat. We did not design that. We noticed it in the first mock-up, in October 2024, and then we made sure not to spoil it.

People ask us what the houses are for, meaning: what do you do in them. The honest answer is that you do very little, and that the buildings are arranged so that doing very little is worth doing. You come up from the beach at half past four with sand on you. You sit down with your back to the wall, which is still warm. The shadow of the overhang moves across the deck at about a metre every eight minutes, which is slow enough that you notice it only when it reaches your feet.

Then the sun goes into the sea, quickly, the way it does at this latitude, and it is cold within twenty minutes and everyone goes in. That is the whole design brief. Everything else on this website — the plots, the plans, the price list, the licences — exists to make that hour available to fourteen households at Comporta, twenty-two at the Sado and nine at Melides, for as long as the houses stand.