Felipe Caboclo Weaves Concrete, Timber and Tropical Garden into a Low Country House in Bragança Paulista

Large country houses in Brazil's interior tend to announce themselves. Casa Tear, completed in 2024 at Quinta da Baronesa in Bragança Paulista, takes the opposite position. Felipe Caboclo Arquitetura designed it with interior designer Nildo José and landscape architect Alex Hanazaki. The house spreads a substantial program across a 3,399 m² plot without ever stacking it into a heavy volume. The name gives the strategy away: tear means loom in Portuguese. Beams, columns and slabs are treated as threads in a structural grid, and rooms, terraces and garden are woven between them.

What interests us is less the loom metaphor than how literally the team applies it. The grid is not a hidden frame dressed in finishes. It is the device that decides where the house is enclosed and where it opens, so the boundary between inside and outside keeps changing as you move through it. The architects frame the scheme as a set of tensions: raw earth against lush planting, structural weight against interior lightness, human scale against a wide Brazilian horizon. Most of those tensions resolve well. A few lean on luxury more than on architecture.

Arrival Through Earth and Shade

The approach sets the tone. A plain concrete path runs toward a low pavilion anchored by a tall earthen wall, a deliberately mute face that holds back the view rather than offering it up. Elsewhere a brick path slips under a mature tree canopy toward a glass-railed timber pavilion whose flat roof cantilevers well past its supports. The two arrivals feel different, and that is the point: one is mass, the other is canopy.

Across a reflecting pool, a stone wall and a timber-screened volume sit side by side behind clipped shrubs. Placing heavy and light materials in direct contact is the house's main compositional habit. It works because each material is allowed to stay what it is. The earth wall is not polished into decoration, and the timber screen is not made to look structural when it is not.

The Grid as Loom

The structural idea reads most clearly at the terraces. Dark columns rise between timber slat panels, carrying a roof that floats over the pool deck. The credits list concrete structure by Leão e Associados, glued laminated timber from Brarewood, and steel consultant Projesteel. Together they suggest a hybrid frame where each material does the job it suits best, although the documentation does not fully confirm where the steel goes.

The infill is where the weaving becomes tactile. A perforated concrete block screen, a nod to the cobogó tradition, filters hard light into patterns against broad tropical leaves. Inside, a round column stands free of the frameless glazing, so the structure reads as a sequence of points rather than walls. You sense the grid without being boxed in by it.

Interiors: Weight Above, Softness Below

The living spaces are long, low and covered by continuous timber slat ceilings that carry on down the walls in places. That ceiling gives the rooms their warmth and also hides services, which explains why the spaces feel so uncluttered. Nildo José's furnishing keeps to low sofas, leather armchairs and wool rugs, all pitched below the window line so the garden stays the dominant element.

White curtains along the glazing are the one soft layer between interior and landscape. They do real work. In a house this open, they are the main way occupants can adjust privacy and glare. We would have liked to see that job given to the architecture more often, through deeper overhangs or more screens, rather than to fabric.

Thresholds That Refuse to Settle

The covered terrace with its slatted ceiling, a small plunge pool and a single lounge chair is the house in miniature. Sliding glass walls disappear, the ceiling runs unbroken from inside to outside, and the lawn begins almost at your feet. A polished terrazzo floor at the entry does something similar. It reflects the timber lining and carries the eye straight through to the terrace beyond.

These in-between rooms are the most persuasive part of the project. They suit the climate of the São Paulo interior, and they make the claimed fluidity between open and closed space concrete rather than rhetorical.

Water and Fire at the Center

Hanazaki's landscape organizes the outdoor rooms around a rectangular pool interrupted by a circular sunken fire pit. From above, the stone ring with its concentric steps reads like a knot in the weave, a single curve inside an otherwise orthogonal plan. Set against green mosaic tile, it becomes the gathering point of the whole site.

The move is theatrical, and the evening shots make full use of it. Still, it earns its place. The fire pit gives the terraces a destination and links the pool to the house at the human scale the architects say they are after.

Facing the Forest

An infinity-edge pool looks out onto a forest canopy, with a glass balustrade keeping the view uninterrupted. The deck is spare: grey-green loungers and a long timber bench. The aerial view explains the strategy best. Flat roofs sit below the surrounding treetops, and the pavilions spread out instead of rising, so from a distance the house nearly disappears into the canopy.

That restraint in section is the project's strongest argument. A house of this size could easily dominate its hillside. Keeping every roof low and every volume thin lets the landscape, not the building, set the skyline.

Plans and Drawings

The plans confirm the dispersed layout. A lower level holds a three-car garage, service rooms and a gym wing, with a small pavilion standing apart. The main floor is single-storey, with bedroom wings branching from a central living and dining zone that opens onto the rectangular pool and a rounded pond. Published figures differ: 1,200 m² in one listing and 1,554 m² of built area in the architect's own account. Either way, the plan shows how much of that area is given to terraces and edges rather than enclosed rooms.

Why This Project Matters

Casa Tear is a high-end weekend house, and it does not pretend otherwise. What makes it worth studying is the discipline of the frame. By letting a hybrid grid of concrete, glulam and steel set the rhythm, and then deciding bay by bay what is glass, screen, earth or open air, Felipe Caboclo produces a large house that never feels like a large object. Students of residential design should notice how much of that effect comes from section and roofline rather than from finishes.

The project also shows how productive close collaboration between architect, interior designer and landscape architect can be when all three work to the same idea. The weave is not only a structural metaphor. It describes a working method in which garden, furniture and frame were clearly designed together. The open question is climate. The published material says little about how such an open house handles heat and glare, and we would like to see that addressed as directly as the structure is.

Tear House (Casa Tear) by Felipe Caboclo Arquitetura, with interior design by Nildo José and landscape design by Alex Hanazaki. Bragança Paulista, Brazil. Area: 1,200 m². Completed 2024. Photography by Estudio NY18.

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