Valerio Olgiati’s Villa Além in rural Portugal is a monumental concrete retreat merging architecture with the arid terrain, offering a secluded sanctuary of shadow, tension, and elemental presence.
Anchored by a 50-meter courtyard encased in monolithic, ruddy concrete, the villa is an exercise in both seclusion and monumentality. Situated inland from the Atlantic and surrounded by cork trees, its presence is at once discreet and commanding, merging the primal materiality of cast-in-situ concrete with an otherworldly abstraction that seems to transcend time.
The central courtyard is the project’s heartbeat. Its high perimeter walls, flaring slightly at the top like petals, create a space of deep spatial tension and intimacy. These overhangs not only soften the harsh Alentejo sun but evoke a latent sense of enclosure and exposure — as though the architecture itself is breathing with the sky. A narrow pool stretches along the long axis, flanked by gardens that are slowly growing into themselves, shielded from the feral livestock of the region by heavy metal gates. It is a place of cultivated stillness, designed as a living void.
The villa’s interior reads like a procession. A gently curved hallway leads from the entrance through communal spaces — a kitchen, a sculptural living room with built-in plinth furniture — and culminates in a series of introverted bedrooms. Each sleeping quarter opens onto a private courtyard, ovals cut into the sky, referencing earlier Olgiati works such as the Atelier Bardill. These spaces are neither entirely open nor fully enclosed, hovering in the architectural liminality that defines Olgiati’s oeuvre.
Despite its modern materials and crisp geometries, Villa Além carries the aura of an ancient ruin, half-excavated from the landscape. There is a refusal of spectacle in favor of existential depth — an architecture of slow time, of shadow, of retreat. The textures are raw, the furnishings minimal, the gestures quiet. It is not a house that reveals itself easily, but one that demands silence and presence.
In Villa Além, Olgiati has composed not a home but a metaphysical condition — a place of withdrawal, resistance, and attunement to the elemental forces of site and form. It is a radical refusal of the picturesque in favor of something far more enduring.
