Raul Gobetti Frames a Native Forest in Ourinhos with Two Terracotta Volumes and a Central Courtyard

A residential lot on a slope, facing west toward native forest, presents a familiar Brazilian dilemma: the best views arrive wrapped in the worst sun. Raul Gobetti Arquiteto e Associados responded to this problem at House MYO in Ourinhos by splitting the program into two distinct volumes, pushing the house as high on the terrain as possible, and placing the living spaces at the center where they could look outward between the flanking masses toward the tree canopy beyond.

What keeps the project from becoming a routine exercise in passive solar design is the material argument running through every surface. A chequerboard terracotta brick screen wraps one volume and faces the street, while vertical timber slats wrap the other and face the landscape. Between them, a metal pergola stitches the two together and casts a geometry of shadow across the central courtyard and pool. The house doesn't just manage light; it choreographs it, turning environmental necessity into an architectural language that shifts in character from room to room and hour to hour.

Street Presence: The Terracotta Screen

From the street, House MYO reads as a single monolithic volume, its face composed of terracotta bricks laid in a patterned bond that alternates solid and void. The effect is simultaneously heavy and porous. Under the harsh afternoon sun, the screen wall absorbs and diffuses light, giving the facade a textile quality that changes with the angle of approach. Young deciduous trees in the front landscape are clearly intended to soften the composition over time, but even now, the facade stands on its own.

Garages and service areas occupy this front volume, which functions as a buffer between the public road and the private life of the house. It is a deliberate inversion of the typical suburban display, where living rooms face the street. Here, the most expressive surface conceals the most utilitarian program.

Ascending the Slope

The site's gradient is not steep, but Gobetti uses it to theatrical effect. Brick-paved steps cut through a grass slope and rise toward the entry, compressing the visitor's view before the house opens up. The stacked stone risers at the entry walkway introduce a rougher, more geological texture that contrasts with the precise pattern of the terracotta above. Planted agave specimens line the path, reinforcing the sense of moving through a curated landscape rather than simply arriving at a front door.

Positioning the house at the highest point of the lot was both pragmatic and experiential. It maximizes the sight line over the native forest to the west while ensuring that rainwater drains away from the foundation. The ascent also creates a threshold, a psychological separation between the street and domestic life that compensates for the relatively open plan inside.

Arrival and the Pergola Threshold

The covered entry courtyard is arguably the most photogenic moment of the project, and for good reason. Slatted overhead beams project parallel bands of shadow across the stone paving, producing a sharp graphic pattern at midday that softens into longer, angled stripes as the sun drops. The metal pergola that spans between the two volumes does real work here: it is the primary sunshade for the west-facing living areas, filtering the scorching afternoon light before it reaches the glass.

At the carport, the same steel beams reappear at a larger scale, and the perforated timber screen doors beneath exposed timber rafters introduce a secondary layer of filtration. Standing at any of these thresholds, you are never fully inside or fully outside. The boundaries dissolve into gradients of shade.

The Central Living Space

At the core of the plan, the open living and dining area occupies the zone between the two volumes, looking out through full-height glazing toward the landscape. Timber cabinetry and vertical wall paneling wrap the interior with warmth, while large-format floor tiles keep the ground plane cool and continuous. The palette is restrained: grey upholstery, natural timber, white plaster ceilings. Nothing competes with the framed view of green canopy beyond the glass.

Clerestory windows along the upper edge of the living room pull daylight into the deeper parts of the plan without exposing occupants to direct solar gain. Combined with the external pergola, they create a layered daylighting strategy that keeps the interior bright but never harsh. The sliding glass doors on the courtyard side can open completely, collapsing the distinction between indoor and outdoor living, which is the expected move for this climate but executed here with real precision.

Courtyard and Pool

The central courtyard, with its pool, sandstone paving, and inset timber deck, functions as the social heart of the house. White stucco walls reflect light into the space while the perforated timber screen wall on the far side filters the western sun and maintains privacy. The pool itself is narrow and linear, more lap pool than resort feature, and it anchors the composition by drawing the eye along its length toward the landscape beyond.

Detail shots reveal that the timber slat panels sit above a white plaster base, creating a datum line that ties together the various courtyard walls. The water surface acts as a reflective plane, doubling the screen pattern and the pergola shadows. On a still day, the courtyard becomes a kind of optical instrument, multiplying and modulating the play of light that the house was designed to control.

Timber Screens and the Forest View

If the terracotta screen belongs to the street, the vertical timber slats belong to the landscape. Viewed from inside, the slats frame the surrounding parkland and native trees in narrow vertical strips, compressing depth and abstracting the view into something closer to a painting than a panorama. From the exterior deck, looking back through the floor-to-ceiling glass, the timber cabinetry and dining area appear as a warm, inhabited volume suspended between the two screening systems.

The pool edge detail shows how carefully the timber and plaster meet the waterline, with reflections blurring the boundary between constructed surface and liquid plane. These joints, where material meets material and inside meets outside, are where the architecture earns its rigor.

Seasonal Character

A winter photograph, shot through bare branches, reveals the house in a different mood. The chequerboard brick volume and flat-roofed pavilion look more austere without the softening effect of full foliage, and the horizontal massing reads more clearly against the sky. It is a useful reminder that good architecture works across seasons, not just in the flattering light of a summer afternoon.

Plans and Drawings

The ground floor plan confirms the bipartite organization visible in the photographs: two rectangular volumes flanking a central living and pool zone. The garages and service areas occupy the front volume, closest to the street, while the bedrooms likely occupy the rear mass. The roof plan shows the extent of the pergola structure and the location of skylights that supplement the clerestory daylighting strategy.

The two section drawings are the most revealing. They show the building profile sitting comfortably on the sloping site, with the floor plate stepping to accommodate the grade change. The sloped roof of the rear volume creates the generous interior height visible in the living room photographs, while the vertical slat screen appears as a distinct layer set outboard of the glass line. The front elevation drawing confirms the horizontal emphasis of the composition, with the slatted screen and glazed openings reading as a continuous band above the plaster base.

The exploded isometric is particularly instructive, peeling apart the roof plane to reveal the room layout beneath. It makes legible the spatial logic that the photographs only hint at: the way the two volumes create a sheltered interior landscape between them, and how the pergola bridges the gap to unify the whole.

Why This Project Matters

House MYO does not propose a new typology or a radical structural experiment. Its significance lies in the clarity with which it solves a common problem. West-facing lots adjacent to natural landscapes are a recurring condition in Brazilian residential work, and the temptation is either to close off the facade and lose the view or to open it up and accept the thermal penalty. Gobetti's response, splitting the mass and filtering the sun through two distinct material systems, is elegant because it is specific. Every screen, every pergola beam, every clerestory strip exists for a reason.

The project also demonstrates that environmental performance and atmospheric richness are not competing goals. The shadow patterns, the material contrasts between terracotta and timber, the reflective surface of the pool, these are not decorative flourishes but direct consequences of the passive design strategy. When a house this carefully tuned to its climate also happens to produce some of the most compelling shadow play you will see in a residential project, the lesson is worth paying attention to.

House MYO by Raul Gobetti Arquiteto e Associados, Ourinhos, Brazil. 482 m², completed 2020. Photography by Daniel Santo.

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