Tayane Vasconcelos Roots a São Paulo Family's Summer House in the Forest Floor at Itu

A family from São Paulo wanted a second home that would slow them down. Not a country estate built to impress, but a retreat calibrated for bare feet, open doors, and long afternoons around a fire pit. Tayane Vasconcelos found the site at Fazenda Vila Real de Itu, a gated enclave surrounded by preserved Atlantic Forest fragments west of the megalopolis. The brief called for accessibility throughout, integrated social spaces, and a material palette that would feel like it grew out of the hillside rather than landed on it.

What makes Mata House worth studying is not any single formal gesture but the way it stacks three blunt materials, stone, timber, and concrete, into a composition that reads differently from every angle. From the driveway the house is a rough stone wall topped by warm timber cladding. From the pool it becomes a pair of white stucco volumes cantilevered over a garden slope. The architects and landscape designer Roberto Riscala treated the terrain as the organizing principle: the house steps with the topography rather than cutting against it, and every social room opens onto a different altitude of the site.

Arrival and the Stone Threshold

The entry sequence is the project's quietest stroke. A sloped drive leads to a rough stone retaining wall that rises almost to the eave line, planting the house firmly in the grade. Timber cladding begins where the stone ends, signaling the transition from landscape to inhabitable volume. A planted border softens the junction, and the absence of a monumental portico keeps the arrival domestic. You walk alongside the house before you enter it.

From the rear the composition flips entirely. White stucco volumes step down the lawn, their clean geometry set against mature trees. The slope that conceals the stone base at the front becomes a full story of glazing at the back, where a lower level gym looks directly into the forest canopy. Vasconcelos uses the grade change to give the house two personalities: grounded and mineral on the street side, light and open toward the garden.

The Covered Terrace as Social Core

In a tropical summer house the most important room is the one without walls. Mata House places a deep covered terrace between the pool and the interior living spaces, roofed by a continuous timber soffit that extends well beyond the sliding glass doors. An outdoor kitchen island sits at its center: a massive timber slab counter on a concrete base, flanked by wood slat ceilings that filter light without blocking it. The detail is deliberately raw, hand finished concrete cladding on the kitchen base, exposed grain on the counter, no polished stone, no stainless steel gloss.

The terrace reads as a room in its own right rather than a transitional zone. Sliding glass panels retract fully to merge indoor and outdoor seating, and the timber ceiling wraps from exterior to interior without a break. When the family gathers here, the pool, the lawn, and the living room all become a single visual field. The gourmet balcony, the TV room, and the main kitchen flow into one another behind the glass line, reinforcing a layout that puts communal life at the plan's center.

Vertical Circulation and the Forest Frame

The staircase is the one moment where Vasconcelos lets structure become spectacle. Cantilevered timber treads with open risers float beside a tall glazed corner that frames a vertical slice of garden. The detail is minimal: no visible steel bracket, no handrail on the glass side, just the rhythm of timber planes stepping upward against a backdrop of green. Natural light pours through the gap between treads, casting striped shadows on the concrete wall behind.

Upstairs the program shifts to private quarters: three suites including a master with walk-in closet and freestanding bathtub. Two additional bedrooms sit on the ground floor for accessibility, keeping the entire daily routine available on a single level for anyone who cannot manage stairs. It is a practical decision that also improves the plan. By splitting the bedroom count across two floors, Vasconcelos keeps circulation corridors short and dedicates the majority of the ground floor footprint to shared spaces.

Material Logic: Stone, Timber, Concrete

The palette never exceeds three primary materials, and each one does a specific job. Stone anchors the house to the hillside and handles moisture at grade. Timber warms every surface a hand or foot is likely to touch: treads, countertops, ceiling soffits, exterior cladding. Concrete provides the structural skeleton and appears as a handcrafted cladding on the façade and terrace, its texture deliberately imperfect to avoid any industrial smoothness.

The restraint pays off across the house's 643 square meters. Because the vocabulary is tight, each material registers clearly against the next. The rough stone wall at the entry gives way to warm timber boards, which give way to the cool white stucco of the upper volumes. There is no moment where one material fights another for attention, and that discipline is what keeps a large family house from tipping into showroom territory.

Why This Project Matters

Summer houses in the São Paulo hinterland can easily default to two modes: rustic cabins that trade comfort for atmosphere, or air-conditioned glass boxes that ignore the climate entirely. Mata House occupies a productive middle ground. Vasconcelos uses deep overhangs, operable glass walls, and a section that follows the slope to keep the house passively comfortable while maintaining a genuine connection to the preserved forest around it. The accessibility provisions are integrated into the plan logic rather than bolted on, which makes the architecture more generous for everyone, not just the family members who need level thresholds.

The project also demonstrates what a small, focused material palette can achieve at a domestic scale. Stone, timber, and concrete are not novel choices, but the way Vasconcelos assigns each one a clear tectonic role, ground, surface, structure, gives the house a legibility that more eclectic approaches rarely achieve. Mata House is proof that a retreat does not need to shout to hold your attention. It just needs to know exactly what it is made of and why.

Mata House, designed by Tayane Vasconcelos, Fazenda Vila Real de Itu, Itu, SP, Brazil. 643 m². Completed 2022. Landscape by Roberto Riscala. Engineering by Romildo Antônio de Oliveira and Alberto Chierighini. Construction by Jattobá Construtora. Photography by Favaro Jr.

About the Studio

Tayane Vasconcelos

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