Renan Mendes Arquitetura Strips a Colonial Brasília Home Back to Its Bones and Rebuilds It in Light

Most residential renovations in Brasília play it safe: swap finishes, knock out a partition, add a pergola. Renan Mendes Arquitetura went further with the Roses House. Completed in 2022, the 506 square meter project began with a colonial-era home whose pitched roof and enclosed balcony kept light and air at arm's length. The architects removed the roof entirely, expanded the balcony, and recast the facade as a filter rather than a barrier. What remains is an architecture of selective transparency, where timber louvers, perforated screens, and circular openings calibrate exactly how much of the outside enters each room.

The project is interesting not because of what was added but because of the discipline with which the existing structure was retained. Nearly every interior wall stayed in place. The original layout was kept intact, yet the house feels categorically different. That gap between minimal intervention and maximal transformation is where the real design intelligence sits. It is a renovation that reads as new architecture while costing far less, achieved in part by repurposing the old roof's timber slats as the raw material for the sunshade system that now defines the street elevation.

A Facade Made from Its Own Past

The street facade is the project's most legible gesture. Stripping away the colonial roof exposed the home's volume as a clean horizontal bar, now capped by a low-pitched plane. Across the front, movable louvers built from reclaimed roof slats hang in a continuous screen, casting rhythmic shadow lines across the expanded balcony and deep into the living areas. The effect is cinematic: as the sun tracks across the sky, bands of light slide across concrete floors and timber ceilings, turning the passage of hours into a spatial event.

Repurposing material from the demolished roof is a pragmatic move that also carries symbolic weight. The house literally wears its former skin in a new configuration, turning a closed element (a pitched roof that shed water and blocked views) into an open one (a louver screen that invites air, light, and the garden). It is a concise argument that sustainability in renovation does not require exotic materials; it requires imagination about what is already on site.

The Curved Wall and Perforated Screen

Around the back, the design language shifts. A white stucco volume curves along the service zone, its form borrowed from an existing curved wall that the architects chose to amplify rather than demolish. The extension terminates in a screen of hollow masonry elements cast on site, punctuated by a large circular portal and scattered square openings. Where the front facade orchestrates light through parallel timber slats, the rear facade fragments it: small squares and circles punch through thick white walls, letting ventilation and daylight reach utility spaces without exposing them.

The circular window appears repeatedly, most notably framing views of the garden from inside the dining nook. It is a motif that softens the orthogonal discipline of the plan and gives the house a visual signature. Paired with the potted rose bushes that line the perimeter, the gesture makes clear why the project carries its name.

Living Spaces Opened to the Garden

Inside, the most consequential change was opening the living, dining, and TV areas into a single flowing zone that runs directly to the expanded balcony and garden beyond. Timber beams span the ceiling in a warm, continuous plane, linking old and new structure overhead. The material palette stays restrained: concrete floor, white walls, natural wood. That restraint lets light and shadow do the decorative work. On a clear Brasília afternoon, the louver system projects a graphic striping across every horizontal surface, a pattern that moves, fades, and returns with the sun.

Cross ventilation was a tangible goal. By connecting front and rear openings through the now-continuous living zone, airflow moves unobstructed through the house, reducing dependence on mechanical cooling in Brasília's tropical savanna climate. The decision to keep original walls as thermal mass, paired with generous openings at both ends, produces a passive comfort strategy that is simple and effective.

Circular Windows and Interior Detail

The dining nook offers perhaps the most photogenic moment in the house. A large circular window sits in the white wall, flanked by overhead louvers that wash the interior in striped light. The geometry is deliberate: the circle becomes a frame for the garden, a composed landscape painting that changes with the seasons. Across the corridor, the kitchen uses the same light timber palette for its cabinetry, and an arched opening in the courtyard wall beyond the window ties back to the curvilinear language of the rear facade.

These details reveal a project that thinks at every scale. The macro move, removing the roof and opening the plan, would mean little without the micro decisions: the proportion of the circular window relative to the wall, the spacing of louver slats, the warm oak tone of the ceiling against cool concrete underfoot. It is this layered attention that separates a competent renovation from a genuinely thoughtful one.

Why This Project Matters

Roses House is a case study in how much architectural character can shift without demolishing and starting over. The bones of the colonial-era home remain, but the experience of moving through it is unrecognizable from the original. Renan Mendes Arquitetura proved that the smartest response to an outdated house is not replacement but re-reading: understanding which walls carry spatial logic worth preserving and which enclosures are simply habits that can be broken.

The project also matters for its material ethics. Repurposing the old roof timber into a louver facade, casting hollow masonry screens on site, and retaining the vast majority of existing walls kept construction waste low and budgets realistic. In a market where clients often equate renovation quality with expense, Roses House argues the opposite: constraint is a design tool, and the most inventive architecture often comes from making more with less.

Roses House, designed by Renan Mendes Arquitetura, Brasília, Brazil. 506 m². Completed 2022. Photography by Maurício Araújo.

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