The Lisbon-based brothers Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus push their residential designs out of the realm of the ordinary toward the surreal and dreamlike. In one project, they arranged the living room furniture of a beach house on a floor of deep sand. In another, a renovated winery, they suspended the volumes of the bedrooms over the living space like geometric stalactites. And in this project for a young family outside the small city of Leiria, they created the perfect archetypal form of a house, straight out of a Monopoly game box or a fairy tale. An apparently solid volume wrapped completely in white plaster 'pitched roof and all' sits on the green plinth of an extended lawn, sharply profiled under the Portuguese sun.

But the visitor soon discovers that the actual living quarters spill out from this milk-carton house on all sides, while the interior opens to the light and air. A single deep opening in the front of the building reveals living spaces nestled around a diagonal void that cuts through the heart of the residence, extending in steps three stories from the roof to below grade. Adjacent to each of the house's four corners, the architects cut a small courtyard into the lawn, bringing daylight to underground bedrooms and creating a floor extending beyond the walls of the house like an invisible root system.