In 1962, the writer Luísa Dacosta wanted an interiorised house that would allow her to concentrate on her own literary universe.

The young Álvaro Siza therefore designed it around shafts of indirect light and took advantage of the gap between the two slopes of the roof to play with the ceiling heights, in a spatial raumplan that was articulated with the furniture. Siza renovated the house in 1987, after purchasing it from José Miranda Santos, in a process of design expansion with several phases until 2003. His son, engineer Carlos Santos, was responsible for commissioning so many furniture prototypes that the house became a kind of Siza laboratory-museum, filled with unpublished pieces and others that would be mass-produced.