Marcelo Couto and Rodrigo Oliveira Weave Five Gardens into a Concrete House for Two Brothers in São Paulo

Designing a shared home for two families without sacrificing privacy is a brief that can easily produce awkward compromises: separate wings connected by a grudging corridor, or a single volume carved into uneasy halves. At Serra House in Itupeva, in the interior of São Paulo state, Marcelo Couto Arquitetura and landscape designer Rodrigo Oliveira Paisagismo sidestep the problem entirely by making the garden do the heavy lifting. Five distinct planted zones and five individual water features organize 1,190 square meters of built area across a sloping, tree-lined lot, giving two twin brothers and their families both togetherness and solitude depending on which threshold they cross.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is the structural gambit that enables this landscape-first strategy. Three linear concrete volumes form a U-shaped plan: two run north to south on the ground floor, while a third stacks on top and crosses perpendicular to the lower pair. The resulting cantilever frames courtyards below and terraces above, turning structure into shade device, privacy screen, and viewing platform all at once. With over 2,000 square meters of the 2,698-square-meter lot given over to garden, the ratio of planted ground to built footprint is roughly two to one, a proportion that makes the architecture feel genuinely embedded rather than merely surrounded.

The U-Plan and Its Cantilever

The three linear sections read clearly from the entry facade, where a concrete wall, planted roof, and garage door sit beneath a mature tree canopy. The semi-buried lowest level tucks garage, multi-use space, and service areas into the slope, so the main living floor meets grade on the courtyard side. From the covered terrace on the upper volume, you look down into the central reflecting pool and across to the planted stone wall, a view that makes the cantilever legible as spatial gesture rather than structural showing-off.

Structural engineering by Modus Engineering keeps the cantilever honest: weathering steel elements and exposed concrete do the work visibly, while wooden screens and untreated wood cladding soften the mass. The combination of multi-colored basalt stone and white cement retaining walls at ground level gives the base a geological weight that anchors the lighter volumes above.

Water as Organizing Element

Five water features sounds excessive until you see how they distribute across the site. The northwestern lawn leads to a rectangular lap pool and hot tub. The central courtyard transitions from lush planting into a reflecting pool spanned by a timber boardwalk on the northeastern side. Each body of water serves a different social register: the lap pool is active and exposed to sky, the reflecting pool is contemplative and enclosed by stone walls, the spa is intimate. Together, they calibrate the gradient from public to private that the brief demands.

The courtyard pool with its lawn stepping stones and a shading mature tree creates a microclimate that is practical as well as picturesque. Water and dense tropical planting lower ambient temperatures in the warmer months, a passive cooling strategy that complements the slatted shading screens on the glazed facades.

Native Planting and the Three-Year Garden

Rodrigo Oliveira's planting palette relies on native species chosen for adaptability and low maintenance, a strategy that pays dividends over time. Three years after installation, the garden has matured into something approaching a self-sustaining ecosystem: large-leafed tropical plants, ferns, and grasses fill the planted beds with a density that looks decades old. The glazed corridor on the house's eastern side captures this effect perfectly, with dappled sunlight filtering through adjacent plantings onto fluted wall panels, collapsing the distance between interior and garden to almost nothing.

Privacy between the social living areas and the three bedroom suites in the southern section is handled by strategic planting rather than solid walls. The greenery screens views without blocking airflow, an approach that keeps both families comfortable without the hermetic feel of a walled compound.

Living Spaces That Open Completely

The main level's long open living area is the social heart of the house, with a timber-lined ceiling and floor-to-ceiling sliding glass walls that retract to merge inside with courtyard. At dusk, the space glows against the planted backdrop, its proportions reading as generous without being cavernous. The covered outdoor dining area, connected to the kitchen, sits under exposed timber beams and corrugated metal ceiling panels that filter light into shifting patterns, a low-tech detail that gives the space a changeable quality throughout the day.

The expansive dining terrace acts as the social hinge between the two families' private quarters. It is the one space where the brief's dual-family program is visible: large enough to seat everyone, open enough to feel informal, and covered enough to use year-round in São Paulo's climate.

Material Contrasts at Close Range

Inside, the material strategy sets rough against refined. The kitchen pairs pale blue cabinetry and a timber countertop island with a rubble basalt stone wall beneath a concrete ceiling, a combination that could read as rustic if the proportions and detailing were not so precise. The bedrooms take a quieter approach: full-height glazing opens directly to the pool deck, framed by vertical timber screens that control both sun and sightlines. The screens are the same untreated wood used on the exterior, a continuity that keeps the material count low and the transitions between inside and outside seamless.

Evening Landscape and the Fire Pit Deck

The circular stone fire pit on a timber deck at the garden's edge is the kind of detail that reveals the project's real ambition. It is not an afterthought or an amenity checkbox; it is a destination within the landscape, surrounded by ornamental grasses that catch the last light. The garden does not end at the pool; it extends into a sequence of outdoor rooms, each with its own character and time of day. Lounge chairs beneath the courtyard tree, the boardwalk over the reflecting pool, the fire pit at dusk: these are programmed landscapes in the best sense, designed with as much intention as any interior room.

Why This Project Matters

Serra House makes a persuasive case that landscape design is not a finishing layer applied after the architecture is done. Here, the five gardens and five water features are structural to the plan in every sense: they organize circulation, create privacy, moderate climate, and give the U-shaped concrete frame its spatial logic. Without Rodrigo Oliveira's planting strategy, Marcelo Couto's cantilevers would frame empty courtyards. Without the cantilevers, the gardens would lack the shade and enclosure that let native species thrive. The collaboration is genuinely symbiotic.

For the two families who share it, the house offers something harder to achieve than luxury: coexistence without compromise. The garden-mediated plan gives each household its own bedrooms, its own sauna garden, its own approach to the pool, while the central dining terrace and living room remain common ground. It is a domestic model worth studying, not because it is scalable, but because it takes a specific social arrangement and builds a specific spatial answer, rooted literally and figuratively in the ground it sits on.

Serra House, Itupeva, São Paulo, Brazil. Architecture by Marcelo Couto Arquitetura. Landscape design by Rodrigo Oliveira Paisagismo. 1,190 m². Completed 2022. Photography by Maíra Acayaba.

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