Exhale Townhouse, Lisbon, Portugal home

Exhale Townhouse in Lisbon, Portugal

8 June 2026

Architecture: McLean Quinlan

Location: Lisbon Region, Portugal

photo © Luis Nobre Guedes

Photos: Jim Stephenson and Luis Nobre Guedes

A place to exhale: McLean Quinlan designs a family home in Lisbon centred on wellness

McLean Quinlan has completed a comprehensive renovation of a Portuguese townhouse in Lisbon for a couple and their young children, transforming the once sterile, poorly configured property into a cohesive family home designed around wellbeing.

photo © Jim Stephenson

The property was originally a series of subdivided houses that had been knocked together in the 1990s. Its interior presented incongruous split-level floors and layering of mismatched internal detailing. The house’s echoing acoustics and a problematic layout necessitated an approach focused on spatial reorganisation and the introduction of natural materials to create a warm and calm family space.

photos © Luis Nobre Guedes

The townhouse is now divided into a four-bedroom main house and a separate self-contained apartment above available to the owner’s visiting family and friends.

photo © Jim Stephenson

The client, a co-founder of a wellness company, approached McLean Quinlan with an open-ended brief that referenced the natural materiality of the practice’s Jackson Hole project as inspiration, and called for more intentional family spaces. It was stipulated that no external changes be made to the street-facing façade of the property, confining all major architectural interventions to the interior and garden.

photo © Jim Stephenson

McLean Quinlan reorganised the house, constraining the open floor plans to create cosier zones and a sense of differentiation. Key architectural interventions included restructuring the split-level floors, relocating the kitchen to better connect the rear living spaces to the garden, carving out a dedicated wellness floor, and designing the interiors of a gazebo-like pool house in the garden. Extensive integrated storage was woven throughout to keep the space feeling uncluttered, alongside a natural palette drawing on traditional Portuguese materials such as local tiles and lime-washed wall finishes.

The ground floor is a direct expression of the client’s passion for wellness and meditation. What was previously a single vast open room has been carved into a series of purposeful zones: a massage room, a dedicated yoga space, a gym softened with curtains and warm spotlighting to avoid the feel of a conventional fitness space, a tucked-away wet zone housing a steam shower wrapped in micro-cement, a custom Douglas fir-clad cold plunge, and an infrared sauna in pale hemlock with a glazed front allowing the bather to look out onto the garden. A dropped Douglas fir ceiling distinguishes the wet zone from the rest of the floor, lending it a Scandic cabin-like quality. Shutters and blinds were introduced to the street-facing windows to filter light and ensure complete privacy, allowing the family to fully inhabit the space without feeling exposed to passers-by. Throughout, warm lighting unifies the floor in a calm, amber glow.

photos © Jim Stephenson

The first floor serves as the home’s primary entry and main family level. To address the disconnected, office-like quality of the original layout, McLean Quinlan introduced freestanding walls and timber screens, part solid and part open slats, to break up the vast open plan while allowing light to reach deep into the plan, creating a series of different zones. Limewashed walls and timber flooring continue throughout, maintaining cohesion across the floor, with flush painted doors reducing visual clutter.

A new kitchen faces directly out to the garden, a dropped timber ceiling defining it from the adjacent dining and family areas. A concealed door in the joinery connects to a pantry, creating a discreet overflow space to pile plates after a dinner party and close the door. The family room sits at the end of the open-plan space with corner views over the garden, providing an ideal setting for entertaining, while timber screening offers a sense of privacy from the stairs and hallway.

photo © Jim Stephenson

The original UPVC French doors at the rear were replaced with panoramic aluminium doors that fold entirely back to open the kitchen directly onto the terrace, while a new curved deck bridges the gap between the house and the dramatically raised garden beyond. External awnings were added to the south-facing rear elevation to provide solar shading to the living-dining area and key family spaces.

A dedicated playroom with maximised storage is located at the front of the home. An enclosed TV snug sits on a separate mezzanine level, while a quiet library and study space is gently partitioned from the main family area by a freestanding wall.

The original entrance felt busy, with patterns and mouldings competing for attention. McLean Quinlan stripped this back to create a moment of decompression on arriving home. The central staircase was enclosed to form a dedicated entry hall, with under-stair storage for coats and shoes integrated beneath. The staircase’s dated glass balustrades were replaced with sections of full and half-height slatted Douglas fir timber, bringing warmth while allowing light to filter through, and a lowered ceiling clad in timber was introduced to the stairwell to compose the space overhead.

photo © Jim Stephenson

The second floor houses the family’s bedrooms. McLean Quinlan worked closely with the interior designer to reapportion the oversized bedrooms into more comfortable, human-scaled spaces. The principal bedroom’s irregular layout was reorganised to create a better sense of enclosure and proportion. The children’s rooms were similarly reapportioned to feel appropriately scaled and secure. Integrated blinds were added to manage solar gain on the south-facing elevation, with air conditioning discreetly incorporated throughout.

photo © Jim Stephenson

The principal bathroom was finished in the home’s signature matte micro-cement, lending it a distinct spa-like quality. The remaining bathrooms feature white glazed tiles with a subtly undulating texture that gently catch the light, laid in a mix of three sizes, inspired by the traditional tiled facades of the local architecture.

Throughout Lisbon Townhouse, McLean Quinlan has woven together light, materiality and spatial proportion to create a home that is as restorative as it is functional. Natural materials and the careful modulation of space ensure that every part of the home serves modern family life while maintaining a sense of calm.

Will Mouland, Associate Architect and Project Lead, McLean Quinlan, said:
‘The house was oversized and disconnected, and we wanted to bring it back to something much softer and more domestic in scale. The project became about carefully shaping moments for family life; spaces to gather, work, play and unwind. Wellness wasn’t an add-on but very much the organising principle of the whole house. Natural materials were central to achieving that, there is an inherent calm to timber, stone and limewash. Subtle references to Portuguese materials helped root it in its setting without being overly literal about it.’

photo © Jim Stephenson

Exhale Townhouse in Lisbon, Portugal home – Property Information

Architect: McLean Quinlan – https://mcleanquinlan.com/

Instagram: @mcleanquinlan

Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Construction began: March 2022
Completion: October 2023
Gross internal floor area: 630 square metres
Local Authority: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa

photos © Jim Stephenson

Client: Private
Form of contract/procurement: Negotiated Tender, prime cost contract
Interior Designer: Valeria Cardoso and McLean Quinlan
Landscape architect: Fernando Martos & FLOAP
Project Manager: X-Log Construção
Main contractor: X-Log Construção
Lighting consultan: John Cullen Lighting
CAD: ArchiCad
Project cost: Confidential
Photographer: Jim Stephenson

photo © Jim Stephenson

Products
Natural plaster: Richimi
Kitchen: Bulthaup (Desen Habitado)
Engineered Flooring/Cladding: Woodlife
Ironmongery: Joseph Giles
Ceramic tiles: Viúva Lamego
Lighting: John Cullen Lighting
Audio Visual: Life Emotions

About McLean Quinlan
We are a family of architects who for over 40 years have been creating distinct, beautifully crafted homes and retreats in the town, the countryside, in the UK and overseas. From studios in London and Winchester our handful of projects are carefully attended to by a tight-knit team of architects and designers supported by a trusted network of professionals and craftspeople, all with a unique role to play.

We are recognised for our ability to carefully curate warmth, texture, scale and atmospheric light to give a space a unique and tangible character. Using natural materials and traditional process but in a highly crafted and contemporary way, we delight in the detail, the sensory, the tactile. Our award-winning buildings are designed to endure and we hope will continue to inspire beyond our lifetime.