Manor House Lima

History

Designed as a rental-apartment building for an emerging neighborhood in the outskirts of downtown Lima, this building is the perfect example of a residential building in the midcentury urban landscape of the Peruvian capital city. Built in 1948 in the old neighborhood and balneario of Miraflores, Manor House Lima meant to be occupied by small families and single residents moving out of the growing (booming) historic center.

The building’s design reveals the progressive transformation of Lima’s traditional residential architecture in the late-1940s, from a neoclassic and usually ornamented facade to cleaner, simpler and unadorned one, but yet in a tripartite building (base, top and body) with a symmetrical entrance. This kind of architecture can be seen in some art-deco buildings in Paris, Madrid or Rome, in which the announcement of new design ideas and building techniques were inevitable driving the new construction, but the patrons and citizens were holding on their habits and residential traditional taste. In this way, Manor House Lima reflects the influence of European urban culture in the 1950s, in which the low-rise residential buildings were the paradigm of good living and of sophisticated urban culture.

Nowadays, Manor House is located in a quiet and yet strategic part of the neighborhood; which make the building not only a highly desired place to live in, but also a cultural reference of Lima’s midcentury residential building.