Siqueira and Azul Arquitetura Layer Light and Louvers into a Coastal Home near Rio de Janeiro

Mangaratiba sits on the western fringe of the State of Rio de Janeiro, where forested hillsides drop to canal-laced coastline. Marone House, designed by Siqueira and Azul Arquitetura with lead architects Lia Siqueira and Felipe Siqueira, reads the site's conditions precisely: the longitudinal plot, the surrounding vegetation, the proximity to still water. Rather than imposing a single monolithic object, the architects organized the program along a central gallery spine that pulls daylight and breeze through the house while maintaining a firm structural rhythm of white steel frames, slatted brise-soleil, and timber screens.

What makes the project worth studying is not any single gesture but the consistency of its filtering logic. Every surface mediates between interior and exterior, between solid and void. Vertical louvers slide to modulate privacy and solar exposure. Perforated brick panels coexist with glass walls. Timber pergolas cast graphic shadow patterns that change by the hour. The result is a house that feels both rigorous in plan and atmospheric in experience, a careful calibration of transparency and enclosure that avoids both the glass-box cliché and the defensive bunker.

The Gallery Spine

The central gallery is the organizing idea. It runs the length of the plot, connecting the main street access to the waterside terraces and splitting the program into two flanks: social spaces on one side, intimate bedrooms on the other. Along this corridor, a white pergola throws dappled light onto the floor while a gridded wooden screen wall provides a secondary layer of enclosure. The effect is processional. You move through alternating zones of shade and brightness before arriving at the pool deck or the interior courtyard.

At one key junction, a planted palm tree rises through the hall beside a floating timber staircase and a translucent glass wall. The moment is theatrical but also functional: the tree acts as a living marker between the ground floor circulation and the upper volume, while the glass wall brings diffused light deep into the plan without sacrificing privacy from the street.

Screens, Slats, and the Art of Filtration

Marone House deploys at least three distinct screen systems: vertical steel slats that slide on tracks, fixed perforated terracotta brick panels, and horizontal timber pergola slats. Each one performs a slightly different task. The steel louvers handle the heavy lifting of solar control on the primary facades, their white finish bouncing light while limiting heat gain. The terracotta screen, visible at ground level beside a young tree and lawn, introduces a handmade texture and a reddish warmth that contrasts with the prevailing white-and-timber palette.

The white steel staircase with open treads stands beside the vertical slat screens like a sectional diagram of the house's layering strategy. Every horizontal plane reads as intercalated slats of unequal width, a detail that prevents the screens from looking monotonous and creates varied shadow densities depending on the viewing angle. It is a controlled complexity: nothing reads as ornament, but everything participates in the visual rhythm.

Interior Courtyards and Planted Rooms

The interior courtyards are where the house breathes. Slatted timber ceilings cast geometric shadows over potted plants and palm trunks, while timber lounges sit beneath vertical slat screens that frame the hillside beyond. These are not residual spaces carved from leftover plan area; they are deliberately sized rooms that happen to be open to the sky. The dining area, set with a long timber table and pendant lights, looks out onto terraced planter beds and a garden wall, turning a meal into a landscape experience.

Gilberto Elkis Paisagismo handled the landscaping, and the integration is seamless. Natural materials, timber, stone, planted earth, allow the architecture to sit softly within the tropical vegetation rather than standing apart from it. The palette never fights the green backdrop; it simply organizes views into it.

Pool, Deck, and the Waterside Edge

The swimming pool extends from the house toward the forested hillside like a constructed echo of the canal waters below the site. Its long, flat surface mirrors the sky and anchors a timber deck island that floats between lawn and palms. The architects describe the pools as having the aspect of "aquatic plains" in dialogue with the calm canal, and from the dusk-lit covered terrace, where the pool edge merges with the main deck, that analogy holds. The water reads as landscape, not amenity.

From the lawn, the two-story facade reveals the full composition: vertical slat panels stacked above a recessed ground floor, the timber deck extending outward, palm trees framing both ends. The white volume appears to hover above the transparent ground level, a solidity floating in lightness. It is a familiar trope in Brazilian modernist residential work, but here it is executed with precision rather than nostalgia, the louvers and brise-soleil giving the box a kinetic quality that pure glass never achieves.

The Glass Pavilion and Social Spaces

The glass pavilion housing the main living area opens fully to the pool deck and the forested hillside beyond. With the recessed lounge pushed back under the upper volume, the ceiling plane extends outward to create a deep covered terrace that blurs the boundary between indoor and outdoor living. The open dining area beneath a slatted white pergola, furnished with wooden chairs and a long table, sits beside a vertical louver screen that can be adjusted to frame or obscure the view.

The social program, living room, dining room, kitchen, and service areas, occupies the ground floor alongside the intimate bedrooms. There is no dramatic vertical separation between public and private. Instead, the gallery spine and the courtyard gardens handle the transition, using changes in enclosure and light rather than elevation to signal shifts in program.

Plans and Drawings

The ground floor plan reveals the angled site geometry and the gallery's role as a central seam. Living spaces, courtyards, and terraces radiate from this spine, each oriented to capture a different view or a different quality of light. The upper floor plan concentrates bedroom suites and private terraces, keeping the footprint compact while maintaining visual connections to the landscape through screened openings.

The section drawings are particularly telling. They show how the split-level volumes step down the sloping site, allowing the house to nestle into the topography rather than sitting atop a leveled platform. Palm trees drawn in section emphasize scale and reinforce the porosity of the plan: vegetation penetrates the architecture at nearly every level.

Why This Project Matters

Marone House belongs to a lineage of Brazilian residential architecture that treats climate as a design generator rather than a problem to be solved by mechanical systems. The sliding brise-soleil, the internal gardens, the cross-ventilated gallery are not decorative references to mid-century modernism; they are active environmental strategies tuned to the humid subtropical coast. In a moment when sustainability discourse often defaults to technological solutions, this house argues for spatial intelligence: orientation, porosity, material selection.

More broadly, the project demonstrates that a rational plan and a rich sensory experience are not mutually exclusive. The longitudinal gallery is as diagrammatically clear as a hospital corridor, yet the layered screens, shifting shadows, and planted interludes make moving through the house genuinely pleasurable. Siqueira and Azul Arquitetura have produced a house that is disciplined in its logic and generous in its atmosphere, proof that rigor and warmth can occupy the same axis.

Marone House by Siqueira and Azul Arquitetura. Mangaratiba, State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Completed 2018. Lead architects: Lia Siqueira, Felipe Siqueira. Engineering: Fernando Cesar Mendes Cardoso Engenharia. Landscaping: Gilberto Elkis Paisagismo. Photographs by André Nazareth.

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