Casa de Serralves is a villa and museum located inside the park of Serralves. Owned by the Serralves Foundation, the house was built by the second Count of Vizela,
Carlos Alberto Cabral and designed by the architect
José Marques da Silva. It is an example of
Streamline Moderne architecture in Portugal. In addition to serving as the Foundation's head office, the building is an extension of the Museum of Contemporary Art, used for the presentation of temporary exhibitions. Its façade overlooks the Rua de Serralves and the main entrance located in the Avenida Marechal Gomes da Costa, Casa de Serralves is a significant example of Art Deco style. The building was constructed on the outskirts of Porto between 1925 and 1944, combining neoclassical, romantic and art deco elements.
History Serralves was originally the summer residence of the Cabral family, residing in the centre of Porto since the early 19th century. Diogo José Cabral, a textile manufacturer whose industry lay in
Vale do Ave, came into the property on his marriage to María Emília Magalhães. This signaled the start of a number of alterations to the property, in which Diogo José Cabral Jr., first Count of Vizela (1864-1923), played a key role. He was a reference in the industrial modernization of the country and received his title in 1900. As Quinta de Lordelo, in one of the expansion areas of the city, it had featured in the topographical map of Porto by Telles Ferreira (1892). It was situated between terraced buildings in Rua de Serralves, their rear courtyards extending down to woods and fields. Pre-1925 photographs of Quinta de
Lordelo, highlight a 19th-century upper-middle-class home with a romantic garden. After the death of Diogo José Cabral Jr., in 1923, his son Carlos Alberto Cabral (1895-1968), second Count of Vizela, then aged 28, inherited the family state on Rua de Serralves. The property was much smaller than it is today. A number of purchases and exchanges enlarged it to its current 18 hectares. In the interim, the property changed its name to Quinta de Serralves. Alberto favored the artistic currents prevalent between the 1920s and the 1940s, in particular French architecture and French decorative arts, encouraged by his visit to Paris to the
International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts in 1925. There he met
Charles Siclis (1889-1942), an architect whose 1929
watercolors are behind the referential image of the Villa,
Jacques Émile Ruhlmann (1879-1933), decorator and architect, and
Jacques Gréber (1882-1962), the architect who was invited to design the new garden. With the aid of the Porto architect
José Marques da Silva (1869-1947), the author of the first drafts of the Villa and the Park, Carlos Alberto Cabral gradually put together different views and contributions. The House of Serralves is considered to be one of José Marques da Silva's greatest achievements. Gréber had designed several gardens in Europe and North America. His plans for Serralves date from 1932, constituting a break with the Portuguese context of the time. The garden plans were based on Marques da Silva's drafts, according to which “the predominant law is always to compose the garden for the house to which it is the requisite companion”. Completed in the mid-1940s, Quinta de Serralves is the result of almost twenty years of designs. In the post-war environment of 1953, however, Cabral failed to adapt to industrial progress and was forced to sell his property. All that remains of that period is the photographic record from Casa Alvão, commissioned by the then-owner. Like the first owner, the second owner of Serralves,
Delfim Ferreira (1888-1960), inherited and consolidated the textile empire of his father,
Narciso Ferreira. The property was purchased by the State in October 1986. An ad-hoc committee was then charged with managing the heritage and adapting the space to a public purpose. Casa de Serralves opened to the public on 29 May 1987. Serralves Foundation was incorporated on 27 June 1989 by Executive Act nº 240-A/89. Its articles of association establish the “promotion of cultural activities in the field of all arts”, perceiving its space - the Villa and the gardens – as an indivisible whole, opening it to the public, preserving its character, guaranteeing the survival of the principles that lay behind its conception, not giving in, however, to a static, dated image but rather attempting to adapt the space to the living structure provided by the framework of its time. In 2004, Serralves Villa was subject to a restoration initiative by the architect, Álvaro Siza. With a total area of 900 square metres, 700 square metres are used as exhibition spaces, which was why the conservation intervention, in particular a restoration intervention, was necessary.
Structure The building's interior is distributed across three floors: a basement floor, which includes the kitchen, pantry and service areas; a ground floor including all the living rooms, dining rooms, atriums and library; and a first floor which corresponds to the private quarters. Visitors entering the Villa through the main entrance from the street, which is relatively dark, will gain their first impression of the building's structure and its relationship with the garden, from the impressive two-storey central hall. Looking in front, through the vast exterior window, they will see the central parterre and park. Looking to the right, they will see the vast salon which extends via the window to the lateral parterre. The Villa's private quarters are in the first-floor gallery around the central atrium. To the left, with a slight difference of floor levels, there is a dining room that overlooks the garden and a billiards room, on the other side, that looks over the street. There is a wrought iron gate designed by
Edgar Brandt which separates this social zone from the Villa's private quarters on the first floor and also the library and service areas on the ground floor.
Interior architecture The Villa's interior architecture and decoration perhaps make it the most notable example of Art Deco style in Portugal. This was a comparatively late intervention, in comparison with the majority of Art Deco buildings in Europe - explained by the many visits and contacts made by the owner and also the delays that occurred in the construction of the building itself. The 2nd Count of Vizela first became acquainted with the canons of this style in France, where he lived, and he visited the leading Art deco exhibition held in Paris in 1925. He then invited some of the leading figures from the international artistic panorama of that time to work on the project. Émile-Jacques Ruhlman designed the dining room, hall, salon, cloakroom and billiard room. Alfred Porteneuve, who worked in the same atelier, endowed Serralves with its charismatic pink colouring.
René Lalique designed the large skylight of the main hall's ceiling, on the first floor.
Furniture The Foundation's current collection of furniture only includes a small part of the Villa's original furniture, given that many of these items were sold at auctions and thus dispersed, prior to the acquisition of the property by the Portuguese State. The main exceptions are the dining-room furniture (repurchased by the Foundation) and the interior architecture equipment (doors, embedded cupboards, doorknobs, bathroom furniture, etc.). During the restoration process of the Villa, overseen by the architect
Álvaro Siza, the latter items were preserved with great care. Part of the Villa's furniture was acquired from leading interior decorators of the period. Several items were brought from the Count's residence in
Biarritz. He also added antiques, which he inherited from the family, thus creating an overall eclectic style.
Ruhlmann and
Leleu design several items of furniture and Silva Bruhns designed the carpets.
Edgar Brandt designed a wrought iron gate of the hall and several wall lamps. Jean Perzel designed the lamps. Other refined aspects of the Villa's interior decoration include the blue limestone and exotic hardwood floors; the marble-lined bathrooms, with stone-carved bathtubs; the geometric patterns of the plasterwork; and the curved form of the library staircase.
Chapel The chapel was given a new exterior covering that ensured that it would be visually integrated within the overall building. The chapel itself dates from the 19th century. One of the family heirs,
Mário Cabral, remembered that the owner wanted to preserve the chapel: “The chapel wasn’t demolished; it was integrated within the overall construction. The part of the building including the chapel was built upon the pre-existing construction. The chapel was inserted within the overall design, but preserved in its original form; as a 19th-century chapel. The chapel was used regularly in the local neighbourhood. The locals came to mass here and I think this influenced him and therefore he didn’t want to demolish it. That was a general idea shared between him and all the architects working with him... one of the amusing aspects was the manner in which they made the cross; the cross was essentially designed by Ruhlman...... which is quite amazing.” ==Park==