Portuguese architecture studio Nuno Ferreira Capa | arquitectura e design has designed a hair salon, featuring naked concrete elements and long opaque curtains to provide flexibility to space in the city of Braga of Portugal.

Called Maison826, the 250-square-metre salon is located at the ground floor of a building of the 1970s in the urban centre of Braga, in Portugal. 

The renewed version of the space maintains the fragments of the historical building, while the new design offers a much more flexible and contemporary salon for its customers.

"This space had been closed for several years giving evidences of layers of interventions, memories and stories. Each wall a story, each window a passage," said the architects.

"A place with many spaces. Each space wrapped in materials and textures successively interrupted by others, where occasionally some naked concrete structural elements appeared. A complex composition of excess of materials and voids of materials."

As the team highlights, with the removal of these layers, it was possible to notice that the composition of its four large semi-enclosed spaces were visually connected but at different levels. 

The architectural concept for Maison826 came up with the interruption of the demolition at the point where fragments of that past could coexist with the new programme intended to be set out.

The programme for the hair salon, for the cultural and musical space and for the concept-store, that share a common entry point, could now occupy each one of the spaces and create spatial and visual relations among them, where one-off interventions in each space would allow to observe the demolition spots.

The Maison 826 project is divided into four levels opened to each other.

In the first level, at an intermediate elevation, a suspended wood block introduces itself as an entrance and as a service desk, steering, visually, the user to other two levels.

A basement level functions a space of cultural dynamics and concerts, while another intermediate level just above serves for the working area and hair care, centrally inhabited by a 5-metre-long wooden working table. 

This space also comprises a recessed hair washing and colouring area for better privacy to the clients. This intermediate level takes us to the fourth level, an area for the OGQMOCA concept store with a small dressing room.

"A Praise to the Unfinished seemed to us to be a concept that could be a new life cycle of this space where there is no place for concern about details… lost by the unfinished where it is thought being missed by rule," added the studio.

"The sparing materials, pillars or concrete beams as well as the solutions of unfinished walls are now what defines the intervention. In each space, a long opaque curtain establishes limits enabling their closure." 

This common scenic element, of great flexibility, helps to define other spatial identities and other luminosities according to the intended use.

Plan basement and Plan ground floor

Plan First and Plan Second floor

Sections

Elevations

Project facts

Project name: Maison826

Architects: Nuno Ferreira Capa | arquitectura e design

Location: Braga, Portugal.

Size: 250m2 

Date: 2020 

All images © João Morgado

All drawings © Nuno Ferreira Capa | arquitectura e design

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