Corkinho Cork Pavilion Still Room

Corkinho, the Antwerp studio that works almost exclusively in cork, has built a still room on the grounds of Casa No Tempo, the Manuel Aires Mateus farmhouse-turned-villa in Alentejo. The price is not published. What is published is how the thing is held together, which is the actual subject here.

The walls are solid blocks of cork, stacked like masonry and run through with metal rods threaded through milled channels. There is no glue and no screws anywhere in the structure. The floor is a timber deck set on removable concrete blocks, and the roof is timber, held down mainly by its own weight on the cork below it. Lead designer Cédric Etienne describes the roof as a hat with four screws, which is close to a complete inventory of the building's hardware.

The cork itself comes from Sofalca, a local supplier, and is heat-treated before use to improve durability. Cork is already a material that resists moisture and insulates well, which is why it has been used for millennia in things that need to keep water or heat on one side of a boundary. Here the blocks are thick enough to do that job structurally rather than as a surface finish, and Etienne reports interior temperatures around 22 to 23 degrees Celsius while it is 40 degrees outside.

The building is fully demountable by design. Etienne's stated intention is zero waste and carbon neutrality, with the option to relocate the structure rather than scrap it. That is a real constraint on how a building goes together, not a marketing line, since removable concrete footings and a rod-and-channel wall system only make sense if taking the thing apart was always part of the plan.

The room functions as a dedicated space for reading, yoga, tea ceremonies and meditation, available to villa guests and to Etienne's four-day silent retreats for design and hospitality professionals.