Catching up with our friends Guilherme de Bívar and Marta Pavão mostly means popping into their renovated home for coffee and chatting about life. The perfect partners in crime—in life and business—the urbanist and architect duo, respectively, have been together for over a decade trying to find their place in the game before settling in Lisbon. No one knows if it’s for good, but their home in a charming, tucked-away neighbourhood of Belém has been bringing them all the joy they’ve been searching for.
"Our house flows onto the street, especially in summer, when all the neighbourhood doors are open and everyone comes together outside. Our kids play here, in the public space, and we’re not bordered by our own fenced courtyard. It’s this idea we love of living in a village and bringing the outer world into our home and the other way around, too."
The soft light comes in at will, sprawling quietly across the three floors—an objectively vertical home that feels uninterrupted, expansive, and free of obstacles or barriers. Wherever you are, you can hear what’s happening. There are old and new living together harmoniously, from a Lina Bo Bardi ‘Giraffe’ chair to plates from Cambodia belonging to Marta’s grandmother or a special armchair with an everlasting message for Guilherme.
Among their many adventures, Guilherme worked at the Rotterdam-based OMA studio with Rem Koolhaas, where he got to be part of the master plan for Waterfront City, an urban district in Dubai that was set to house as many as 1.5 million people.
"Urbanism is not that different from architecture; you just extend the scale you’re working in. In architecture, it’s you and the client; with urbanism, the client is the city."
Before putting down roots in Lisbon and founding Atelier Cais, Marta worked in India alongside Guilherme, and eventually, their paths led them to New York and Brazil—where they lived in the iconic Oscar Niemeyer’s Copan building. Nowadays, along with architecture and urbanism projects, Marta teaches two times a week at the Lisbon School of Architecture while Guilherme, besides Atelier Cais, manages a number of projects in partnership with OODA studio, each bringing their own skills to the table and making it all exciting and challenging.
