The Long Battle
History paintings of war, shown at the scale they were made to be seen.
10:00 AM / 6:00 PM
Architecture, interiors and exhibition design
We design buildings, interiors and exhibitions for people who notice the way a room feels before they notice how it looks.
Rooms that hold the light
About the studio
Every project starts on site, with a notebook and a long walk. It ends when the light falls the way we drew it, when a visitor slows down without being asked to, and when a building still makes sense after the photographers have gone home.
Selected works
Built, shown and lived in
Architecture
Ochre Pavilion
A cultural pavilion on the Porto waterfront wrapped in 1,340 terracotta fins that turn the river light into a...
Exhibitions
Hall of Quiet Light
A white hall for a collection of Nordic photography, lit only from above and hung lower than the museum standa...
Objects
Stool No. 3
A three-legged oak stool first drawn for the Stepped Library reading rooms, finished in linseed oil.
Architecture
Terrace House
A family house in the hills of Sintra, stepped down the slope so that every room opens onto its own terrace.
Exhibitions
Salon Rouge
A salon hang of ninety portraits on deep red walls, with a bench at the height of the bottom row.
Interiors
Gallery Apartment
A Lisbon apartment for a collector of prints, with a long picture rail that lets the walls change every month.
What we do
Four practices under one roof, sharing the same drawings, models and long table.
Public buildings, houses and cultural venues, from the first site visit to the last snag list. We stay on the project through construction.
Homes, hotels and workplaces where every material is chosen for how it ages, sounds and feels under the hand.
Permanent galleries and temporary shows for museums and foundations: layout, cases, lighting, graphics and the paths visitors take.
Furniture and lighting made in small runs with workshops in Portugal and Norway, often drawn first for one of our buildings.
How a project unfolds
Five stages, one team
The same people carry a project from the first conversation to the opening night. Scroll to walk through it.
-
01
Listen
We spend the first weeks asking questions: who uses the place, at what hour, and what they want to feel there.
-
02
Survey
Light studies in every season, soil and structure surveys, and a measured drawing of everything we keep.
-
03
Sketch
Dozens of quick options on paper, then three we believe in, presented side by side with honest costs.
-
04
Model
Card and timber models at 1:50, then full-size mock-ups of the details people will touch every day.
-
05
Build
We stay on site through construction and come back a year after handover to see how the place is used.
Restoration
From render to the real thing
Drag across the image to compare the competition render of Casa do Vale with the house as it stands today.
Render, 2021
Built, 2024
64
Buildings completed since 2009
23
Exhibitions designed for museums
11
National and European awards
38
Architects, makers and curators
The Lighthouse
A short film on how light shapes a building
Exhibitions
On view and coming up
Salon Rouge
Ninety portraits hung frame to frame on deep red walls, as in a nineteenth-century salon.
10:00 AM / 6:00 PM
Weight of Light
Dutch still lifes hung in a single dim room, each lit by one narrow beam.
11:00 AM / 6:00 PM
Paper Cities
Contemporary paintings of imagined cities, hung on freestanding walls you walk between like streets.
10:00 AM / 7:00 PM
From the collection
Wander the wall
Works we lit, hung or built cases for. Drag in any direction, or use the arrow keys, and open a work for its label.
Clients and partners
In their words
They moved one wall by forty centimetres and the whole gallery started to breathe. Visitors now stay twice as long in the room nobody used to enter.
The house is not big, but every morning there is a new patch of sun to sit in. That was the brief, and they took it literally.
Larapen designed a touring show that fits in two trucks and still looks built for each venue. Our registrars finally sleep at night.
Three winters later the library still looks new, and the top terrace is the most booked room in the city.
Trusted by museums, foundations and families
Kunsthall Vika
Nordlys Hotels
Museu do Rio
Lumen Press
Brann & Co.
Fundação Maré
Journal
Notes from the long table
Why we hang paintings lower than everyone else
The museum standard puts the centre of a painting at 145 cm. We hang ours at 138, and visitors stay longer without knowing why.
A plan is a letter to the people who will build it
Why our drawings carry notes, sketches and the occasional apology for the builders who read them.
Concrete that ages well: notes from three winters
What we learnt about white aggregate, rain and patience from the Stepped Library in Aarhus.
Start a project
Tell us about the site, the collection or the question. We reply to every message within two working days.
Write to the studio