Casa Modesta: A Family House Turned Rural Retreat in Portugal’s Algarve

When friends of mine returned from a trip to southern Portugal a while back, they told me all about their secret find: Casa Modesta, a rural guest house on the Ria Formosa Nature Park in the Algarve. Before owner Carlos Fernandes and his sister, Vânia Brito Fernandes, inherited the house from their grandparents, it was a small 1940s house typical of the region. Vânia, who is an architect and a partner at PAr, a women-run design firm in Lisbon, renovated the house into a modernist white stucco retreat. Carlos named it after their mother, Modesta Maria, and worked with Albio Nascimento and Kathi Stertzig of The Home Project to design the interiors of the nine guest rooms.

Photography by Alex Reyto for the Perfect Hideaway, unless otherwise noted, all courtesy of Casa Modesta.

Above: The long house has nine guest rooms, each with its own private patio.
Above: Architect Vânia Brito Fernandes worked with her partners Joana Carmo Simões and Susana Dos Santos Rodrigues of PAr to conceive of the two divided modernist properties: one with guest rooms and the other for communal spaces.
Above: The communal kitchen is used for cook-ins, culinary classes, and workshops.
Above: The architects built a kitchen island from Canadian Douglas fir from
Lacecal Habitar. The countertops are made from a local stone called Brecha Algarvia and are fitted with
Smeg ceramic cooktops. The pendant range hood is the
Ikea Läckerbit.