Typically, wedges divide one thing from another. But a new home in Porto, Portugal, by local firm Tsou Arquitectos challenges that assumption by leveraging the wedge for unification.

Casa Vertical is a single-family home gracefully positioned on an awkward lot in downtown Porto. To play smart with the property’s irregular proportions, Tsou Arquitectos designed a 2,500-square-foot, wedged-shaped building with half-floors organized around a central staircase that runs each of its 4.5 stories.

“The project intends to accommodate the functional program on a narrow plot of land in the center of the city,” the architects explained. “The organization of the various spaces is carried out vertically and develops around a central staircase with the distribution of the compartments on half floors. The staircase unifies the intervention, where the guardrail unfolds like an origami piece.”

On the first (ground) floor, visitors are welcomed into a gradually widening hallway that leads to a studio and a powder room. Looking upwards, the home’s snaking, central stair creates a parallelogram-shaped opening which extends to the building’s roof.

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