About Us

ORIGO was founded in Lisbon by Adam Kessler and Elena Vargas, an architect and a creative director who shared one conviction: that a building should grow out of its landscape rather than be placed upon it. The name is Latin for origin or source, a reminder that every project begins somewhere specific, and that our first task is to understand it.

Today the studio brings together architects, interior designers and landscape specialists working as one team. We keep the practice deliberately small, so that the people who first walk a site with a client are the same people who resolve its final details.

Our aim is to make buildings that feel inevitable in their setting: calm, precise and quietly generous to the people who use them. We favor local materials, passive comfort and forms that answer to sun, wind and terrain, so that each project uses less and lasts longer.

We measure success over time rather than at completion. A house that is loved more with every season, a retreat that weathers into its coastline, a gallery where the landscape becomes part of the collection: this is the architecture we want to leave behind.