This is where we live, in Porto. The house was built in 1927 and belonged to my grandfather's family. For decades, like so many houses featured on this blog, it was inhabited by an old lady who payed a measly rent and never did any repairwork, besides feeding hundreds of pigeons and seagulls every day, sometimes inside the house. The bitter fruits of rent control policies, which in this country were started by the fascists and continued by the socialists, are urban decay, price speculation and the engorgement of the suburbs.
Needless to say, when we started work on the house it was falling to pieces and we barely managed to save it. It was a developer's house, with a somewhat awkward internal partitioning and not very thick walls, but the details are lovely and it was easily adjusted to modern life, with no drastic alterations.
Right now it's being submitted for an award - wish us luck!
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