Tetra House is a train of wood and concrete blocks mounted on branching pillars

The exuberant tropical landscapes of Brazil, blanketed in abundant swathes of green cover, have long been welcoming surfaces for the work of some of the most celebrated architects of the past and current centuries. Inviting experimentation in form, materiality, climatic and contextual design, or above all else, ideas, the country’s man made and built environments have been sites for innovation, featuring designs that defy convention and in some cases, even gravity. Continuing this narrative, with another impressive gem in the canon of contemporary Brazilian architecture, São Paulo-based Felipe Caboclo Arquitectura has completed a private residence set on an uneven site in Fazenda Boa Vista, which employs subtle structural flair to create spaces that embrace their natural setting.

Balanced on the highest point of the site, the residential design project does occupy a substantial portion of the free space available there, although the entirety of its built up area is not solely covered in a sheet of concrete architecture. When devising this intervention, the Brazilian architects focused on privacy as a guiding force, making their design fortified against the advance of eyes from the outside world, but still balanced in terms of its openness to the surrounding scenery. However, before all this, they had to overcome the staggered elevations of different points on the site, reconciling the slope and incorporating it into their scheme.

From a bird’s eye view, Tetra House comprises a sequence of four blocks separated by landscaped voids, which alternate along a simple linear path. The northernmost of the blocks has been extruded further towards the east, while the southernmost one leads towards a rectangular pool. Both these spaces are separated by a courtyard architecture in the very centre of the layout, breaking the assemblage of built volume with a flourish of green—a common motif throughout the design. The massing essentially adheres to a simple L-shaped path, with the bulk of it concentrated towards the north and west. Most of the eastern part of the site has been left open, save for the edges of the swimming pool and that of the north-facing block. A football pitch takes up the extreme southern border of the site, rounding off the layout on a macro scale.

Aside from the central courtyard, there is another court towards the northeastern corner of the side, submerged beneath the upper floor level. Seen from the main road and entrance, the façade design emphasises horizontality, with the low mass of the first floor peering over the slope of the site. Once again, exposed concrete has been combined with wood architecture—either directly cladding the building’s surfaces or incorporated as slatted louvres, common fare in Brazilian takes on tropical modernism.

Subversion is a prominent theme in this residential architecture project, where the entrance and car park are on the first floor instead of the ground level. Entry from this point leads one to a double height space screened by a two-layered envelope of glass and wooden louvres, which border a concrete staircase design that spills down into a living room on the ground floor. To its north, a glass wall looks into the thick greens of the northern court, with the other side opening up to a verandah that flows into the grass-carpeted central courtyard. Contrasts in the density and nature of vegetation on either side are an intriguing sight, enhancing the visual dynamism of the design.

The aesthetic inside the living area adheres to the chromatic motifs of greys, browns, and blacks that characterise much of the interior design, along with the prominent use of wood-panelled ceilings. As simple and tasteful decorations in this context, the furniture designs make use of fabric upholstery, leather, wood, and metal. Suspended from the double height ceiling, a spindly chandelier illuminates the space, offering a statement that diverged from the remainder of the design. On the eastern side of this space are a lounge and a guest bedroom, completing the ground floor of the northern block.

Wandering deeper into the plan, towards its western wing, another point of subversion emerges. The alternation between built and unbuilt is enhanced through a structural design that is almost entirely column free, with normal vertical supports replaced by a row of branching, angular columns, each group emanating from a single point in the ground, to spread out and accept the lower bound of the four concrete blocks of this wing. Hence, instead of creating a “forest of pillars,” as described by the architects, these load-bearing elements have been elevated to an almost sculptural feature that is a defining aspect of the house’s architectural identity. The columns are rooted in square patches of landscape design, between the blocks, which represent the voids segregating them.

Underneath the blocks, the design team has accommodated spaces that include a bar and outdoor dining area, along with a spacious exterior lounge and sit out. Stretching along one side of the pool, these areas are shaded by the first floor volumes, whose cantilevering undersides are lined by black metal beams, introducing a machine-like quality to the otherwise natural palette.

Overhead bridges sheathed in glass and wooden louvres much like those on the façade and northern volume, stretch across the greened voids between the blocks, connecting four bedrooms housed inside them. Each of the blocks is topped by a fairly large overhang, which stretches in tandem with the balcony beneath it. These balconies are perhaps the most important features of the first floor, hovering over the landscape to give residents a view like no other. There is a remarkable ingenuity to be noted in Felipe Caboclo Arquitectura’s clever use of a uniform and restrained vocabulary to create spaces that cannot be described as boring from any angle, emphasising how their use of subversion and framing can defy expectations of what might have otherwise been just another rudimentary concrete and wood house among the dozens strewn throughout Brazil.

Project Details

Name: Tetra House
Location: São Paulo, Brazil
Area: 2300 sqm
Year of Completion: 2022
Architect: Felipe Caboclo Arquitetura
Design Team: Amana Roveri
Execution: Lampur Engenharia
Landscape Design: Maria João D’orey
Manufacturing: Lightwork