Matéria Base Grows a Rammed Earth and Timber House out of a Mantiqueira Hillside in Joanópolis

Joanópolis sits in the Mantiqueira Mountains, a region whose folklore includes the Lobisomem, the Brazilian werewolf, and the Matita-Perê, a figure known by its piercing whistle in the night. Matéria Base named this 497 m² house after that legend, and the choice reads as more than local colour. The brief asked for a home for a new life, a place to step down from urban speed into a rural routine. The architects answered with a building they describe as emerging from the earth itself, taking on volume, space and domesticity the way the ground does.

What makes the house worth your attention is how literally it pursues that idea without sliding into rustic nostalgia. The photographs show walls that read as rammed earth, rough stone piers, slate floors and exposed timber roof framing, all arranged in low pavilions around a courtyard and a boulder-edged pond. The roofs are the giveaway: a sawtooth of tilted planes and clerestories that pulls light deep into the rooms while keeping the profile close to the slope. Completed in 2024, the project is a careful study in how a country house can feel heavy and grounded at the base yet open and lit above.

A Cluster That Reads as Landscape

From the air, the house refuses to behave like a single object. A long spine of timber and stone runs across the hillside, broken into pavilions, with grass-roofed outbuildings tucked nearby. The courtyard arrangement gives the building an inside edge and an outside edge, which matters on an open slope where wind and views come from everywhere.

At ground level, the strategy pays off. Approached across gravel, the house is a low band of timber cladding and clerestory glass fronted by a screen of stone piers. Nothing rises far above the line of the hills behind it. You read the building as a series of terraces and walls before you read it as a house, which is precisely the effect a project claiming to grow from the earth should produce.

Sawtooth Roofs and Light Monitors

The roof is where Matéria Base lets the house speak. Stepped, sloping planes alternate with strips of clerestory glazing, producing a sawtooth that recalls industrial sheds more than farmhouses. In the low sun, those monitors catch light and throw it down onto timber ceilings, so the interior gets daylight from above rather than relying only on the facade.

We like how the roof does double duty. It is a light device, and it is also a way of breaking a 497 m² programme into domestic-scale pieces. Each pavilion carries its own tilted crown, framed at the front by timber lattice screens and glazed doors. The black chimney flue that punctures the roofline is the only vertical accent, a quiet signal of where the hearth sits.

Water and Fire at the Edge

The glazed living pavilion faces a still pond ringed with boulders, and the photographs make clear this is not decorative landscaping. The water doubles the sloped roofs in reflection and sets up a foreground that holds the eye before the hills take over.

At dusk, a bonfire on the terrace and the lit kitchen pavilion turn the long facade into a lantern. Pairing water and an open fire in front of a house so concerned with earth and timber completes a fairly obvious elemental set, but it is executed with restraint, and it gives the rural routine of the brief a physical setting.

A Hearth Under the Trusses

Inside the main pavilion, the exposed timber trusses define a long, double-height room that runs from dining to living. At its centre hangs a black conical fireplace hood above a stone fire pit, the room's single sculptural gesture. Everything else, from built-in bookshelves to slate floors, stays in the background.

The suspended hearth is a smart planning move. It anchors a space that could easily feel like a hall without blocking sightlines through sliding glass doors to the mountains. Raking afternoon light from the clerestories lands on the trusses and the floor, so the structure is legible at every hour, and the room reads as built rather than finished.

Rooms Wrapped in Earth

The bedrooms and quieter corners are where the earthen walls carry the atmosphere. Their striated surfaces glow in low sun, picking up the warmth of timber sills and terracotta objects. A pitched beam ceiling above and glazed doors opening onto the lawn keep these rooms from feeling cave-like.

This is the house's most convincing argument for its concept. The walls are not cladding or texture; they appear to be the mass of the building, and the furniture is placed against them as you would place it against a hillside. The palette is narrow, which lets the material do the work.

Stone Piers and Covered Galleries

The connecting spaces are generous. Corridors lined with exposed stone piers and narrow glazing link the bedroom wings to the living pavilion, with slate underfoot and timber beams overhead. The rhythm of pier and slot turns a circulation route into a slow walk, with light arriving in measured strips.

Outside, the same language forms covered verandas and galleries: rubble stone on one side, timber posts on the other, a dining table set within the gallery and hammocks strung between posts at the end. These in-between zones are where the brief's shift from city to country becomes daily practice, since much of life here is evidently meant to happen half outdoors.

Stairs and the Courtyard

The slope is handled with rough stone stairs flanked by heavy walls, climbing toward a timber-roofed veranda. These moments make the topography felt rather than hidden. The grass courtyard at the heart of the plan is framed by the veranda, an earthen wall and a screen of slender stone piers, giving the house a protected outdoor room that still lets air and views pass.

Where the stair runs beside a timber window wall, the contrast is direct: rough stone against a fine frame, agave in pots against white curtains. The house is at its best in these juxtapositions, where the heavy ground and the light timber roof meet at eye level.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings confirm the logic seen in the photographs. The site plan shows a long retaining wall with parking below, keeping cars off the upper slope. The floor plan organises a central living pavilion with two bedroom wings linked by a corridor, and the pond sits just below. Sections reveal a sunken room within the main pavilion and the stepped roof profile, while the wall section details a pitched eave of timber beams and glazing resting on a rammed earth wall raised on a concrete drip edge, a detail that protects the earth from splashback. The axonometrics isolate the timber roof framing of trusses and rafters from the wall plan, which makes the house's two-part construction strikingly clear.

Why This Project Matters

Many rural houses in Brazil borrow a vocabulary of timber and stone as finish. Matita-Perê House treats those materials as the structure of the idea: an earthen and stone base that belongs to the ground, with a lighter timber roof that gathers light. The split is visible in the drawings and in every room, and that legibility is what keeps the project from reading as a style exercise.

It also offers a useful model for the growing number of people leaving cities for the countryside. Rather than importing a suburban house onto a mountain site, the project breaks its programme into low pavilions, invests in verandas and galleries, and lets the courtyard and pond organise daily life. For you as a designer, the lesson is that a strong concept, here the house as earth, only works when it reaches down to details like a drip edge under a wall.

Matita-Perê House by Matéria Base. Location: Joanópolis, Brazil. Area: 497 m². Year: 2024. Photography: Manuel Sá.

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