The carpentry by the lake served as a hands-on teaching experience in experimental timber construction. Participants began by installing a pontoon with timber legs anchored in the mud, then built up a working deck using beams, joists, and decking. Once the platform was established, timber frames were positioned and braced, allowing work to continue on the shading panels. Emphasising sustainable design, the team reused waste canes found on site, cutting, drilling, and threading nearly 2,000 short pieces to form a splayed shading system. Dead canes from a nearby bamboo grove were incorporated into a second structure, with both shading panels providing functional bracing for the timber frames while demonstrating circular construction techniques.

In Celtic Portuguese folklore, the ‘Enchanted Moura’ are described as magical genies who guard watery thresholds and awaken from their slumber in midsummer to guide humans through moments of transition. Physically, this transition might involve passing through a doorway, window or natural edge (the boundary between earth and water). Spiritually, this transition might be from the unconscious to the conscious state, or from the familiar to the unknown.

These dwellings house the ‘Enchanted Moura’, and invite you to enjoy the threshold between land and water & the process of waiting and becoming; bathing, soaking, cooling aided by porous clay, mud and water.

Waking Life and Land Regeneration Project commissioned two lakeside structures for bathing and resting and through a collaborative design and build we hoped to create a pair of spaces which bring together elements of local ecology, geology and folklore.