Practice · Lote — Promoção Imobiliária, Lda. · Alcântara, since 2011

Practice

We are two people. We buy difficult plots within ninety minutes of our office in Alcântara and build one house on each, and one of us is on every site every week.

Lote is Portuguese for a building plot, and each house we build is known by the number of its plot. We choose an architect for each plot, keep the same builders from one house to the next, and you deal with the two of us from the first viewing to the keys.

Two of us

Inês Moura

Civil engineer. Runs construction: the builders, the schedule, the Tuesday site meeting and the snag list at the end. She signs off every house before we show it.

Duarte Reis

Surveyor. Finds the plots and buys them — owners, heirs, councils, the land registry. He has walked every plot we own before anyone drew on it.

Plots bought, 2011–2026

One tick per residence, labelled by plot number · one mark per year

Founded

Lote 07 found — 26 months, eleven signatures

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

2024

2025

2026 · Quinta da Serra

2026

One difficult plot

Eleven owners

Lote 07 · Casa do Monte · Palmela · bought June 2020 · finished 2025

March 2018

Duarte found the terrace above Palmela in March 2018: a shelf cut into the slope in 1911 for cork oaks, three of them still standing. The land registry named one owner, who had died in 1974.

2018–2020

The land had passed to his children and to theirs, and had never been divided on paper. When we had traced every branch there were eleven owners — in Palmela, Setúbal, Lyon and Newark, New Jersey. Two of them had never met.

June 2020

It took twenty-six months, three notaries and a video call at four in the morning to collect eleven signatures. We paid every share the same price per square metre, and paid one lawyer to act for all eleven, so nobody signed anything that had not been explained to them.

2021

Cork oaks are protected in Portugal; felling one needs a licence, and we never asked for one. Inês Vaz Arquitectos drew the house around the trees: a long lime wall to the north, glass to the south, and a courtyard for the largest oak.

2025

Casa do Monte was finished in 2025, seven years after Duarte first walked the terrace. Four of the eleven came to see it.

How we work

Five clauses, on every plot

We build within ninety minutes of our office in Alcântara, because one of us is on every site every week.

We buy one plot at a time and build one house on it — occasionally one small building of apartments.

We choose the architect for the plot, and we put the architect’s name on the house.

Plans, prices and brochures go to anyone who asks. You don’t have to register or book a call to see them.

Viewings are on site, Tuesday to Saturday, and one of us is there.

Architects we work with

With the plots each has drawn

Inês Vaz Arquitectos

Casa do Monte

Quinta da Serra

Atelier Brás Pato

Casa das Rochas

Casa da Duna

Mónica Leal

Casa do Pinhal

Casa Rasa

Oficina Dourado Sá

Pátio Largo

Tiago Serpa

Janelas Verdes

If you know of a difficult plot within ninety minutes of Lisbon, Duarte would like to hear about it.

Write to us →