Project: Pitanga House
Architects: Estudio BRA
Location: Santa Isabel, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Area: 3,530 sf
Photographs by: Federico Cairoli
Pitanga House by Estudio BRA
The Pitanga House is a contemporary single-family residence located within the Santa Isabel municipality of Sao Paulo, Brazil. It is designed by Estudio BRA, a Brazilian studio whose Sorocaba House project in Sorocaba, Sao Paulo has already been featured on our site.
This concrete residence is placed in the middle of a relaxing atmosphere for its inhabitants who wanted to get out of the busy town streets at all costs. From afar, the Pitanga House looks just like a stone in between the large trees and shrubbery.
House for a Relaxing life. The Pitanga House was designed for a family who decided to move from one of the busiest neighborhoods in the city of Sao Paulo to live in Santa Isabel, a city about 55km from the capital. The plot is in an environmental reserve, which makes the native vegetation appear abundantly. This oriented the most important visuals of the house to the denser part of the forest but that did not harm any visual of the house because on all sides of the 800 sqm plot you can see large trees.
The house is divided between three levels. At the upper floor we find the bedrooms and a small office. The kitchen, barbecue, laundry room, living room and a suite are located at the groundfloor sharing space with the trees. The whole ground floor has large glass sheets that close (or open) the living and dining room and thereby control their integration with the leisure area and pool are on the same level.
At the lowest level thre is a volume of concrete embedded in the natural profile of the lot, in this part we have an office for the couple who can now work from home, a garden and a garden, a space for the care of the dogs of the house [two English shepherds and a mutt dog] plus a room for the pool machinery. Access to these areas is by a prefabricated concrete helical staircase, which creates a path and kind of displacement, even within the lot, to register that the couple is leaving for work. Even if this ‘going to office’ only means leaving the main volume behind. The concrete structure makes the house look like a stone in the middle of the trees and aims to make a smooth transition between the natural and the built by the human hand.
