Repeating a single shape does not have to produce identical rooms. At Cookie Cutter Retreat in Sobral de Monte Agraço, Portugal, Fala Atelier built three semicircular volumes in small, medium and large sizes, then gave each one a different job.
An international community of digital nomads commissioned the retreat after living in houses around the nearby village. The digital nomads’ first request was modest: toilets and storage. The brief grew from there. The finished 500-square-meter compound, completed in 2024, holds a private house, a shared dwelling and a larger hall for gatherings.
The Porto-based studio, Fala Atelier, set the three buildings into a sloping plot. Each one follows the same geometry but meets the ground in its own way. Dezeen, which reported on the project, described the volumes as topped with grass roofs.
Retreats built into existing structures take a different route, and this converted farm barn shows how. Studio Weave’s Isle of Wight barn retreat reuses materials rather than excavating new ground.
Each semicircle works as a retaining structure. The curved edge is a concrete wall that holds back the hill, while the straight edge opens into a broad glazed facade. A tilted metal canopy, made of mesh according to two of the sources, shades the glass. Round concrete columns mark the threshold between inside and outside.
Rooms Built for Digital Nomads
The most unusual decision sits inside. A diagonal wall divides each building into two zones. On one side lies an open space. On the other, a dense cluster of small rooms. Fala Atelier based those rooms on fragments of floor plans from houses by Toyo Ito, Frank Gehry and Álvaro Siza. The studio copied their internal relationships almost verbatim. In the largest building, the winding corridor from Siza’s Beires House now leads to showers and toilets.
The materials make the system easy to read. The curved perimeter walls are white-painted concrete, while the diagonal walls are painted a blue so dark it nearly reads as black. Exposed concrete ceilings hold a dense grid of Minase lamps. Fluorescent yellow shows up on doors, kitchens and furniture, and a thick round column with blue and white stripes stands beside the glazing, reflected in the glass.
Terrazzo floors, marble countertops and custom galvanized-steel furniture repeat across the three buildings. The studio’s own description suggests that the consistency is deliberate. As Fala Atelier put it, “The consistency allows the differences to become more intriguing.” The shared palette lets digital nomads and other visitors read the family of buildings before they notice how each one differs.
The slope complicates the plan. The drawings suggest that the three semicircles face one another, but the terrain blocks most direct views between them. Visitors move between the buildings along paths, and the relationship between them is built through walking rather than a single view across the site.
Granite stones found on the property now serve as places to sit, gather or wander. Seen from a distance, the buildings recede into the hillside. Large windows and bright blue chimneys are the only clear signs of occupation. The studio’s description of the result is “almost disappear,” a phrase that fits the photographs.
Lifting a retreat off the terrain offers another way to minimise its impact on a hillside. Floating Cabins Rethink Writers’ Residencies in Swiss Alps takes a contrasting approach to sloping sites.
That near invisibility carries a cost. The ground had to be extensively excavated before the buildings could settle into the slope. The quiet presence of this retreat architecture is therefore an engineered effect, achieved by reshaping the hillside itself.
H/T yankodesign.com
Frequently asked questions
Who designed the Cookie Cutter Retreat in Portugal?
The Cookie Cutter Retreat was designed by Fala Atelier, a Porto-based studio. The compound is located in Sobral de Monte Agraço, Portugal, and was completed in 2024.
Why did digital nomads commission the Cookie Cutter Retreat?
An international community of digital nomads commissioned the retreat after living in houses around the nearby village. Their first request was for toilets and storage, and the brief grew from there.
Whose floor plans inspired the rooms in the retreat?
Fala Atelier based the retreat’s cluster of small rooms on fragments of floor plans from houses by Toyo Ito, Frank Gehry and Álvaro Siza. In the largest building, the winding corridor from Siza’s Beires House leads to showers and toilets.
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