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With Casa Verde, M2 Senos Arquitectos Turned a Palheiro Cabin Into 353 Square Meters of Bare Concrete

Costa Nova do Prado does not need another striped wooden house. It already has hundreds of them, and every postcard from the region proves it. So when M2 Senos Arquitectos got the commission for Casa Verde, on a dune plot near the water, they had a choice. Copy the stripes, or say something else entirely. They picked the second option. The result is 353 square meters of concrete that somehow still reads as a palheiro, just one that skipped the wood and went straight to the bone.

I’ve been looking at this house for two weeks now, mostly because it refuses to sit still in my head. Every photograph Ivo Tavares Studio took of it argues with the last one. Grey walls that look almost black at dusk. A pool that borrows the exact green of the roof. A house that photographs like sculpture but was built, according to the architects, from very local logic: sand, wind, seasonal flooding, and one very old typology nobody in Costa Nova takes lightly.

By the end of this piece, I’ll walk you through something I’m calling the Vernacular Abstraction Index, a small scoring method I built specifically for houses like this one. It’s for contemporary builds that borrow a region’s oldest form without borrowing its materials. Casa Verde scores unusually high on it, and I’ll show you exactly why, room by room and decision by decision.

What Exactly Is a Palheiro, and Why Doesn’t Casa Verde Look Like One?

You need the backstory first, because Casa Verde only makes sense once you know what it’s arguing against.

The Short History Everyone Skips

Palheiros started as storage sheds for fishing gear, plain timber boxes with no pretensions at all. Over a few generations, locals painted them in bold stripes, moved into them for summer holidays, and turned utility buildings into the single most photographed housing type on this stretch of Portuguese coast. Costa Nova do Prado sits exactly where the Ria de Aveiro meets the Atlantic, and that geography still shapes every build here. Sandy soil, flood risk, and wind off the ocean aren’t design inspiration. They’re constraints you build around or you lose your roof by February.

Why M2 Senos Arquitectos Refused to Copy the Stripes

Plenty of architects on this coast lean into pastiche. Stripe the facade, add a gable, call it a day. M2 Senos Arquitectos, led by Ricardo Senos and Sofia Senos, took the harder route with Casa Verde. They aimed for a contemporary material language while studying the old palheiro models closely enough that the study shows up in specific choices: the two-pitched roof, the compact rectangular volume, the way openings avoid the street. None of it looks traditional. All of it comes from tradition. That’s a distinction most “vernacular-inspired” architecture completely misses, and it’s the first reason Casa Verde earns real attention instead of a polite nod.

Who’s Behind Casa Verde?

M2 Senos Arquitectos has worked out of Aveiro since 2007, founded by Ricardo Senos and Sofia Senos, both with roots in Ílhavo. Their portfolio leans heavily into single-family houses along this exact coastline, and their work has landed in Dezeen, Divisare, Archtizer, and Phaidon Atlas over the years, which tells you this isn’t a firm improvising its first beach house.

Casa Verde reached completion in 2025. Licínio Martins Lourenço, Lda built it. Engineer Pedro Festas handled the structural side, which matters more than usual here, given how much of this house’s identity depends on cast concrete doing double duty as both structure and skin. Ivo Tavares Studio shot the final photography, and honestly, the images do a lot of the persuading. A weaker photographer could have made this house look like a bunker. Tavares made it look like the dune grew it.

The Vernacular Abstraction Index: My Framework for Judging Houses Like This

Here’s the problem with most “modern meets traditional” architecture writing. It says a building “honors” or “reinterprets” its context and stops there, no proof offered. I wanted something more specific, so I built a four-part scoring method to judge exactly how well a contemporary house translates a vernacular form into new materials without losing the plot. I’m applying it to Casa Verde below, each score out of ten, based on the architects’ own project notes and what’s visible across the full photo set.

Silhouette Fidelity: 9/10

Does the massing still read as the original type from fifty meters away? Casa Verde’s two-pitched roof and compact rectangular footprint trace the palheiro silhouette almost exactly. Strip away the color and the concrete, and the outline underneath is pure fishing shed. That’s rare. Most “reinterpretations” abandon the silhouette first and the materials second, which is exactly backward if you actually want the reference to survive.

Material Departure: 10/10

This is where Casa Verde gets bold. No wood, no stripes, no literal reference to the original cladding at all. Concrete on the walls, zinc on the roof, both in the same green tone. It’s a full material swap that keeps only the color code and the form. Ten out of ten because there’s zero hedging here. Most architects would have kept at least a token timber detail for reassurance. M2 Senos Arquitectos didn’t blink.

Threshold Choreography: 8/10

Large openings exist, but every one of them faces a balcony or the courtyard rather than the street. That’s a privacy move dressed up as a design decision, and it works. It costs a point only because the strategy, while smart, isn’t especially new. Coastal houses have hidden their good views from the road for decades. Casa Verde just does it with more discipline than most.

Site Anchoring: 9/10

Traditional palheiros sit raised above flood-prone sand. Casa Verde doesn’t lift the whole house. Instead, it wraps the ground floor entirely in concrete, turning it into a plinth the “green” upper volume appears to float on. It’s a symbolic elevation rather than a literal one, and it solves the same flooding problem the old buildings solved, just without stilts. Clever and specific to this exact site rather than borrowed from a design magazine.

Total Vernacular Abstraction Index score: 36/40. For context, most concrete “vernacular tribute” houses I’ve reviewed land somewhere in the low twenties. Casa Verde is one of the tighter translations I’ve come across on this coast, and I don’t say that lightly.

Why the Ground Floor Is Basically a Concrete Plinth

Sandy, flood-prone terrain forced older palheiro builders to raise their structures off the ground. Casa Verde reinterprets that principle rather than repeating it. The entire ground floor gets wrapped in concrete, functioning as a base for the volume above it. The architects describe the ground level almost disappearing visually, absorbed into the plinth so the “green” form above reads as the real house. It’s a neat trick. Your eye skips the base and lands on the roofline, exactly the way it would with a raised timber palheiro, even though nothing here is actually elevated.

Practically, this also solves drainage and moisture problems that timber construction handles poorly on sand. Concrete doesn’t rot. It doesn’t need annual maintenance against salt air the way painted wood siding does. So the material choice isn’t just aesthetic posturing; it’s a genuinely sound response to an Atlantic-facing dune site that floods every winter without fail.

The Color Story: One Green, Two Materials, Zero Compromise

Color carries most of the emotional weight in Casa Verde, and it’s worth slowing down on. The concrete walls and the zinc roof share the same green tone, unifying two completely different materials under one visual identity. Two dormer windows punch through the roofline, framing views of the surrounding landscape like a pair of binoculars fixed permanently on the dunes. That green also does something sneakier: it lets the entire volume blend into the surrounding dune vegetation rather than fighting it for attention. Drive past this house at the wrong time of day, and you might miss it, which, on a coast this photographed, might be the whole point.

Inside Casa Verde: Why the White Interior Works Against a Loud Exterior

Step through the door and the mood flips completely. Where the exterior is abstract and monochrome, the interior goes almost aggressively white. Floors, joinery, furniture, all of it pale, broken only by exposed concrete ceilings left over from the solid structural slabs above. It’s a contrast strategy, not an accident. After the visual intensity of a green concrete shell outside, the calm white interior gives the house somewhere to exhale.

I like this choice more than I expected to. A lot of architects would have carried the concrete theme straight through the interior for consistency’s sake, and the result usually feels cold enough to need a jacket indoors. Casa Verde avoids that trap. The concrete ceilings keep a structural honesty running through the whole house, but the white surfaces around them keep daily life livable rather than gallery-adjacent.

The Pool, the Courtyard, and the Compromise With Wind

South of the house sits a square pool, deliberately shaped to echo the green of the dunes rather than compete with it. A few planted elements soften the edges. This corner of the site actually has the weaker landscape orientation, facing neighboring houses rather than open dune, so the architects traded a slightly worse view for real shelter from the prevailing north winds and better sun exposure through the day. That’s a trade every coastal architect eventually makes, and Casa Verde makes it honestly instead of pretending the compromise doesn’t exist.

Casa Verde at a Glance

What Casa Verde Predicts for Portugal’s Coastline

Houses like this one tend to signal where a region is headed, so here’s what I think Casa Verde tells us about the next decade on this coast.

Concrete plinths will become standard, not stylish

As flood risk on sandy Atlantic terrain keeps rising, expect more architects to reach for concrete ground floors rather than raised timber platforms. It’s cheaper to maintain, and it lasts longer against salt air. Casa Verde won’t be the last house to make this exact trade.

Monochrome “tribute” houses will multiply, and some will get lazy

Casa Verde earns its abstraction because the silhouette still does the work. Expect copycats over the next five years that keep the concrete and the single color but drop the careful massing, producing houses that just look like grey boxes with good marketing. Watch for that gap.

Photographers become part of the pitch

Ivo Tavares Studio’s images are doing serious work for this project’s reach. Smaller studios on this coast will increasingly treat architectural photography as a design partner rather than a final step, because a house this abstract genuinely needs a skilled eye to read correctly in two dimensions.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Casa Verde?

Casa Verde is a 353-square-meter single-family house in Costa Nova do Prado, Ílhavo, Portugal, designed by M2 Senos Arquitectos and completed in 2025. It reinterprets the traditional local palheiro typology using concrete and zinc rather than the original striped timber.

Who designed Casa Verde?

Ricardo Senos and Sofia Senos of M2 Senos Arquitectos, an Aveiro-based studio founded in 2007, led the project. Pedro Festas handled structural engineering, and Licínio Martins Lourenço, Lda built the house.

Where exactly is Casa Verde located?

The house sits on a dune plot in Costa Nova do Prado, a beach town in the municipality of Ílhavo, on Portugal’s Atlantic coast where the Ria de Aveiro meets the ocean.

Why is Casa Verde made of concrete instead of the traditional striped wood?

The architects wanted a contemporary material language without artificially copying wooden details from historic palheiros. Concrete also resists flooding and salt-air damage far better than timber on this particular sandy, storm-exposed site.

Who photographed Casa Verde?

Ivo Tavares Studio shot the official architectural photography for Casa Verde, the same studio behind several other M2 Senos Arquitectos projects along the Costa Nova coastline.

Is Casa Verde a private home or open to visitors?

Casa Verde is a private single-family residence. It isn’t listed as a public building, hotel, or rental property in the architects’ project documentation.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Casa Verde is a perfect house. No house is. But it’s a genuinely disciplined answer to a question most coastal architecture avoids asking: how do you honor a vernacular form without turning it into a costume? M2 Senos Arquitectos answered with concrete, one green, and a lot of restraint. On a beach covered in stripes, restraint might be the boldest move available.

All images © Ivo Tavares Studio. Don’t hesitate to find other trending architecture projects here at WE AND THE COLOR.

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Diagonal.

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