With Sublime Comporta Sand, we designed the next chapter of one of Portugal's most recognisable hospitality destinations, set within 51 hectares of cork oak and umbrella pine forest in Comporta. The brief was not to add a new facility beside the existing Sublime Comporta, but to project forward an identity that already had a recognised legacy, originally shaped by architect José Charrua.

We treated the site as far from neutral. Before drawing a single volume, we carried out an exhaustive survey of the existing vegetation, giving particular attention to the cork oaks and umbrella pines already standing across the estate. Those trees became our guides for positioning the 43 villas: not a single umbrella pine or cork oak was felled to make room for a road or a building. That constraint is not incidental to the design, it is structural to it. The layout emerges largely from the voids left between the trees, reversing the conventional logic of site planning: landscape does not sit as a backdrop here, it dictates the plan. Without it, this would not be the design we arrived at.

The architectural language draws on the contemporary cabin of the Sublime Terracota villas, itself a restrained reading of Comporta's vernacular, the fisherman's house reinterpreted through a contemporary lens. We extended that same matrix across the whole of this new phase, including the shared buildings. Working with a typology repeated 43 times posed its own question: how do you preserve singularity inside a replicable system? Our answer was to anchor every villa to a specific condition on the ground so that each unit reads as individual within a coherent whole.

Materially, we relied on timber, sand, and earth-toned renders and traditional brickwork to dissolve the built volumes into the landscape. Timber, in particular, works by removing mass rather than adding it, a way of paring back volumetric presence that also answers a contemporary demand: that materials follow a logic of recycling, reuse and renewability, not just an aesthetic one.

Beyond the villas, we designed three shared buildings to organise the experience of the estate. The Atrium is conceived as a large, welcoming square, the social core where reception, restaurant and daily life converge, and where we wanted every shared activity to happen from day one. The Aqua, our wellness building, opens outward to the landscape in deliberate contrast to the more introverted Atrium. The Forum, sized for events and flexible enough to absorb both gatherings and logistics, has become something like the elder of this family of buildings, larger in scale, but never in competition with the villas; instead, it orients how guests move through the estate.

That duality runs through the whole proposal: privacy and community, seclusion and encounter, held in careful balance. It is, in the end, what we hope any guest will feel when moving between the isolation of their own villa and the shared life of the estate.

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Architecture, Fragmentos, José Alberto Charrua (co-autor)
Specialities, A400
Interior design, Andringa Studio
Landscape architecture, Greengest
Supervision, Proman
Construction, Grupo ACA
Lightdesign, Light Design
Measurements, Dimscale
Images, 4+ Arquitetos
Photography, Francisco Nogueira

More about the project: https://www.fragmentos.pt/en/projects/sublime-comporta-sand