Nommo Arquitetos Splits a Curitiba Family House into Three Blocks to Climb a Four-Meter Slope

Suburban gated communities in Brazil produce many houses and few ideas. Lots are standardized, setbacks are fixed, and the usual result is a large box placed in the middle of a lawn. AC House, designed by Nommo Arquitetos for a young couple in Curitiba, starts from the same constraints: a 650 m² plot, a 392 m² programme and a four-meter level change across the site. It reaches a much more considered answer.

What interests us is how literally the architects let the ground make decisions. The brief rested on three priorities: a free ground floor, good sunlight, and the use of the natural terrain to sort rooms by function and privacy. Rather than leveling the plot, Nommo splits the house into three blocks on separate storeys and lets each one find its height on the slope. The garage digs in, the living floor opens to the garden, and the bedrooms sit above in a timber-shuttered volume. Because the section does the work, the plan can stay simple.

A Closed Face to the Street

From the road, AC House is guarded. A white brick upper volume sits over a base of sliding timber panels and a timber garage door, capped by a thin cantilevered roof. The street elevation reads as two horizontal bands. It gives away almost nothing about the garden and pool behind it, which is the correct posture for a house that sits close to its neighbors in a gated community.

The figure standing on the roof terrace in one view is a small clue to what is going on. The house is not a single object facing the street. It is a set of stacked platforms, and some of them are outdoor rooms. The side elevation confirms this: a black roof slab and a low black wall frame the white upper volume, so the composition reads more like layered planes than a solid mass.

Reading the Slope

The white site model explains the house better than most photographs. Two storeys step along a tilted base, and the four-meter drop is absorbed by the building instead of being cut away. At dusk, the corner of the white brick garage wall rises out of a concrete base as the grass bank climbs beside it. The lowest block works almost like a retaining element, holding parking and services against the hill.

The architects placed a garden on top of the garage, which turns what is usually dead roof area into usable ground at a higher level. A second external staircase connects that garden to the open terrace on the upper floor. The result is a loop of outdoor circulation that runs around the house as well as through it. Stepping stones across the lawn and a vertical timber slat wall tucked under a concrete canopy keep these routes informal.

Pool, Grass and Steps

The most successful landscape move here is also the plainest. Instead of hard terraces, the level change next to the pool is resolved with grassed steps that double as a sloping lawn and informal seating. In one view, a woman simply climbs them toward the living room. The turquoise pool, the timber deck and the grass bank sit in a tight, ordered strip with a concrete wall and a black flue behind.

The overhead shot of a swimmer beside the grass strip shows how compact this arrangement is. Nothing is oversized. The pool works as a plunge and lap volume within the lot's limits, and the garden is shaped by the terrain more than by planting. Here the grade is used as the landscape material.

The Free Ground Floor

The brief asked for a free ground floor, and the covered terrace under the cantilevered upper volume is where that request shows up most clearly. Two folding chairs, timber shutters, the pool steps and afternoon sun: the space is barely furnished because it doesn't need to be. It sits between the living hall and the lawn, shaded by the bedroom block above.

Material changes mark the edges. Granite steps and a white brick wall run beside the plunge pool, and a timber soffit underlines the overhang. Behind it all, the araucaria trees, the native pine of Paraná, give the garden a vertical backdrop the house didn't have to build. Their presence explains a lot of the restraint in the elevations.

Timber Shutters as Climate Control

Seen from the rear, the top block reads as a raised timber-clad volume on a dark column, floating over the lawn and pool among the araucarias. The cladding does more than decorate. The wooden brise-soleil, supplied by Madeiras Monte Claro, is the house's one clearly documented passive shading device. Its sliding panels let the occupants adjust sun and privacy room by room.

From inside, the same system becomes a set of black-framed timber louvre shutters in a white room. They filter light without sealing the bedrooms off from the garden. For a house organized around getting sunlight right, putting this control in the residents' hands, instead of fixing it in the facade, is a sensible choice.

Light, Texture and Domestic Scale

The interiors repeat a small set of materials. Slatted timber ceilings bring the outside cladding indoors, and floor-to-ceiling black-framed windows give the upper rooms a direct view of the trees. The palette is calm and sparing, which suits a couple setting up their first family house.

The best interior moment is in the stairwell. A perforated ceramic block wall throws oval spots of sunlight across a white door and the floor, so a service space becomes the most animated room in the house. Elsewhere, a white fireplace with a cantilevered hearth ledge and stacked firewood below acknowledges Curitiba's cool winters, a climate detail that many Brazilian houses ignore.

Plans and Drawings

The plans make the three-level logic legible. The basement holds a three-car garage, the stair and service rooms. The ground floor opens into a single living and dining hall with a terrace, a small service block, the lawn and a lap pool. Upstairs, bedrooms with bathrooms line a corridor beside the roof terrace. Each floor has one clear job, which is exactly what sorting by use and privacy should produce.

The sections are where the project argues its case. The longitudinal cut shows stepped volumes following the ground, with trees at either end. The cross section pairs a stair core with the double-height garage under a thin cantilevered roof slab. Read together, they show a house designed in section first and in plan second.

Why This Project Matters

AC House is not radical, and it isn't trying to be. Its value lies in showing what a mid-sized suburban house can gain when the architect treats the slope as an asset instead of a cost. The garden on the garage, the grassed steps and the external stair between terraces all come directly from the four-meter level change. A flatter, cheaper approach would have erased every one of them.

For anyone designing in a gated community, the lesson carries over. Keep the street face quiet and put the effort into the section. Give residents adjustable control of sun and privacy through simple timber elements. Let existing trees and terrain carry the landscape. Nommo Arquitetos shows that a tight lot and a standard brief can still produce a house organized around the specific character of its ground.

AC House by Nommo Arquitetos, Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil. Area: 392 m². Year: 2018. Photography: Eduardo Macarios.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.