Ines Vaz
Founding director since 2012
Trained in Porto and Zurich. Leads the cultural and interior work, and is the studio's most stubborn advocate for keeping what is already standing.
MArch FAUP · Registered OA 14771
We are twenty-two people in two studios, and we still draw by hand before we draw anything else.
Cairn was founded in Lisbon in 2012 by Ines Vaz and Tomás Ferreira, after eleven years working separately on other people's buildings. The practice has grown slowly and on purpose: we take on around eight projects a year, and a director stays on every one of them from the first site visit to the last snag.
We work in Portugal, Scandinavia, Japan and around the Mediterranean. What connects the work is not a style but a method — look for a long time, build with what the place already has, and leave the result open enough that people can make it theirs.
Four principles.We have not needed a fifth.
- 01
Context before form
A site arrives with more instructions than any client can give. Slope, wind, light, the neighbour's gable, the path everyone already walks. We spend the first month reading those before we propose anything.
- 02
Material with meaning
Every material is a decision about where something came from and how it will age. We prefer the ones that get better wet, get better old, and can be repaired by someone local.
- 03
Light as architecture
Light is the cheapest material and the one most often wasted. We model daylight from the first week — not to meet a standard, but because a room's whole character is settled by where the sun lands at four in the afternoon.
- 04
Built for time
We design for a hundred years of use and at least two changes of mind. That means generous structure, honest services, and as few one-way decisions as we can manage.
A practice builtone project at a time.
- 2012
Studio founded
Ines Vaz and Tomás Ferreira take a room above a stonemason's yard in Lisbon. First commission: a 62 m² apartment for a friend.
- 2014
First public building
A parish library in Setúbal, won in open competition, built for €640 a square metre.
- 2016
First international project
House Among Pines begins in Telemark. Sigrid Halvorsen joins to run it and never quite leaves.
- 2018
Adaptive reuse practice
Foundry Yard, Rotterdam. The studio commits to retrofit as a discipline rather than an occasional job.
- 2020
Copenhagen studio
A second studio opens on Refshaleøen, six people, sharing a yard with a boatbuilder.
- 2022
Arca opens
Porto's Arca Cultural Centre completes after four years. The public passage is used by 3,000 people a day.
- 2025
Twenty-two people
Two studios, nine countries, eighty-four completed projects, and a rule that we still all eat lunch together on Thursdays.
Twenty-two people.Five of them answer the phone.
Directors stay on projects from the first site visit to the last certificate. The five below lead the work; the other seventeen are the reason it gets built properly.
Tomás Ferreira
Founding director since 2012
Runs the residential portfolio and every project that involves a difficult slope. Was a mason for two years before he was an architect, which shows in the details.
MArch FAUP · Registered OA 14802
Sigrid Halvorsen
Design director since 2016
Leads the Copenhagen studio and the timber work. Responsible for the practice's habit of building 1:20 models of anything anyone argues about.
MArch AHO Oslo · MAA Denmark
Adaeze Nwosu
Principal architect since 2017
Runs the largest projects — Arca, The Lantern, Foundry Yard — and the studio's environmental modelling. Sits on the city's design review panel.
MArch UCL Bartlett · ARB, RIBA
Kenji Morikawa
Senior architect, landscape since 2019
Joined from a garden practice in Kyoto. Leads landscape and masterplanning, and quietly ensures that half of every project we do is not a building.
MLA Kyoto Institute of Technology
And seventeen more
Architects, two technologists, a full-time model maker, the landscape team, and an office manager who knows where everything is. Everyone who works on a project is named in its drawings.
Lisbon 14 · Copenhagen 8
Two rooms, one workshop, and a very large table.
The Lisbon studio occupies the top floor of a 1940s printworks: one long room, north rooflights, and a model workshop at the end that everyone is expected to use.
Copenhagen is a former sail loft on Refshaleøen, shared with a boatbuilder who is the reason we now know far more than we did about laminated timber.
