The Serralves house is a unique example of a villa-garden complex with art deco architecture. Built during the interval between the two world wars 1925-1940, with great decorative rigor and quality of materials, which involved the most famous architects and decorators of that time, such as Marques da Silva, Charles Siclis, Emile Ruhlmann, René Lalique, Edgar Brandt and the pasiagista Jacques Gréber.

The Mata-Sete farm, which belonged to his mother Maria Emília Magalhães, had a romantic garden, a chapel from 1882 and a house from 1918.

The history of Casa de Serralves began in the early 1920s after Carlos Alberto Cabral (1895-1968), 2nd Count of Vizela, inherited his family's summer farm. A cultured and well-traveled man, he had an attraction for modernity and cosmopolitan living.

In 1927 he hired the architect who had already worked with his family, Marques da Silva, and asked for the extension of the existing house in the Quinta, located where the current one is today. The process of adding and enlarging the existing house, ends up forcing the old house to be demolished in 1934, but keeping the original chapel standing, although camouflaged by a new dressing of walls and futuristic tower. Between December 1929 and January 1930, the famous Charles Sicilis (1889-1944) designed a project for the exterior of the house, which unifies all parts of it, maintaining the most important north-south, east-west axes of growth of the house , and which relate it to Marques da Silva's initial idea for the garden, which in the meantime was developed by Landscape Architect Jacques Gréber (1882-1962).

The house has a north-south axis, which links it between Serralves street, its formal entrance facing that street, the central hall of the house, and the large dining room facing south and its open garden and good sunshine. . The other east-west axis is marked by the development of the growth of the house from the chapel, in the west direction, and with the living room facing the other open garden, parallel to the great avenue of large trees in the direction of Av.Gomes da Costa that would still be built in 1939.

The authorship of the House can be attributed, with some care, to the French architect Charles Siclis (1889−1944), whose contribution proved to be decisive in the overall design of the project, and to José Marques da Silva (author of the projects for the São Bento Station and the National Theater of São João, both in Porto) that developed, altered and performed it. Carlos Alberto Cabral, Jacques Émile Ruhlmann (1879−1933) and later Alfred Porteneuve (1896−1949), his nephew and architect by profession, also intervened in the project.

Some of the most important European names in the field of furniture design contributed to the interior of Casa de Serralves: Ruhlmann, René Lalique (1880−1945), Edgar Brandt (1880−1960), Ivan da Silva Bruhns (1881−1980), Jules Leleu (1883−1961), Jean Perzel (1892−1986) and Raymond Subes (1893−1970).

Carlos Alberto and his wife Blanche Daubin were to settle in the House in 1944, however they lived there for a few years. In 1955, the property was sold to Delfim Ferreira (1888−1960), on condition that the property was not subject to any transformation. The commitment was fully respected. Much of the furniture was sold at auctions, and is now dispersed.

In 1987, the Portuguese State acquired the property from the heirs of Delfim Ferreira with the intention of installing a museum of modern art. The House was opened to the public that same year, as a place for modern and contemporary art exhibitions until the opening, in 1999, of the new Museum of Contemporary Art in Serralves, designed by the architect Álvaro Siza Vieira. In 2004, Siza supervised the restoration of the House and its interiors. Providing spaces for exhibitions and projects by artists integrated in the program of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Casa de Serralves constitutes, due to its architecture and design, a museum in its own right.