Written by
Inês Carvalho
Founding Partner
There is a kind of perfection that belongs to renderings: every surface even, every joint invisible, every shadow soft. It is beautiful for about a second. Then the eye slides off, because there is nothing for it to hold.
Real materials do not behave this way. Stone carries the record of how it formed. Timber remembers the tree. Plaster keeps the rhythm of the trowel. These are not defects to be specified away. They are the reason to use the material at all.
A surface that shows how it was made invites you to stay with it.
A note on tolerance
On site, we ask makers for consistency of intent rather than uniformity of result. A wall should look as though one person built it on one good day. Within that, variation is welcome.
The houses we admire most are the ones that have been allowed to age. Floors worn along the path from door to kitchen. A handrail polished by sixty years of palms. Imperfection, in the end, is simply evidence of life.
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