TETRO Arquitetura Lifts a Three-Winged Concrete House on Six Inhabited Pillars Above Old Stone Walls in Nova Lima

Most hillside houses in Brazil's mountain suburbs begin with a bulldozer. The slope gets cut into terraces, the old walls come down, and the forest is trimmed back to make room for a pool. TETRO Arquitetura took the opposite position at Xingu House, an 1,800 m² residence on a roughly 8,000 m² plot in Nova Lima, just outside Belo Horizonte. The site already had natural plateaus, stone retaining walls from an earlier structure, patches of preserved Atlantic Forest and grassy clearings facing the mountains. The architects, led by Carlos Maia, Débora Mendes and Igor Macedo, kept nearly all of it.

What makes the project worth your attention is how that restraint becomes structure. The main volume rises about six meters above natural ground and splits into three cantilevered wings, each pointed at a different view. It stands on six thick, board-formed concrete pillars that also contain the bathrooms, the staircase, the elevator and the service rooms. The ground stays almost untouched, the house hovers over it, and the old stone walls run straight through the space underneath. We read it as a house organized by contact, suspension and partial detachment, and each of those three conditions is legible on site.

Floating Over What Was Already There

The arrival sequence makes the central decision clear. A cobbled drive runs along a wall of red volcanic stone inherited from the site's previous life, and the concrete volume cantilevers right over it. The architects neither demolished the wall nor rebuilt it as decoration. They left it in place as a datum, so the new house reads as something added on top of an older landscape rather than something replacing it.

The material contrast does much of the work. The rubble walls are rough, warm and heavy. The slab edges above are smooth, curved and thin, and in places the volume is wrapped in dark cladding or screened panels. The glazed ribbon windows bend with the plan, so the box looks less like a slab dropped on piers and more like a line tracing the contour of the hill.

Six Pillars That Do More Than Hold Up

The pillars are the most original part of the project. They are not columns in the usual sense. They are irregular, faceted masses that widen, narrow and twist where they meet the soffit, and the timber formwork leaves its grain on every face. Seen from below, each one looks closer to a carved rock than to a structural element.

Their thickness is practical. Each pillar holds service program: wet rooms, vertical circulation, the elevator core. That frees the elevated wings for open living space and glass, and it means the structure, the plumbing and the circulation all reach the ground at only six points. For a house that wants to touch the terrain as little as possible, this is a sensible way to concentrate the footprint, and it gives the architecture a sculptural presence that a steel frame would not.

Water Beneath the Wings

Reflecting pools fill much of the ground beneath the raised volume, and they matter more than the photographs alone suggest. They bounce light up onto the concrete soffits, double the faceted pillars and give the shaded undercroft some brightness. A curved glazed corridor with slim bronze mullions crosses one of the darker ponds, so moving through the house becomes a bridge over water as well as a view of it.

The cantilevered stair, with stepped treads hanging over a still pool, is a small but precise move. It continues the logic of suspension at a human scale: even the route between levels avoids landing heavily on the ground. The planting of banana leaves and caladiums at the water's edge keeps these spaces from looking like a museum forecourt.

The Undercroft as a Room

Lifting a house six meters usually leaves a leftover space underneath. Here the undercroft is fully programmed. A timber deck, lounge seating and an infinity-edge pool sit in the shade of the bar above, with the tapered piers reflected in the water and the forested hills beyond. It is the most social part of the project and probably the most used, because it offers shade, breeze and a view at the same time.

The spaces between levels are just as considered. Timber steps climb between two stone walls under a concrete soffit dappled with reflected light, and a covered walkway runs between glass on one side and a boulder retaining wall on the other. In these places the dialogue between new concrete and inherited stone is at its closest and most physical.

Seen from Above

The aerials show what the ground-level photographs can only suggest: the house is a fairly compact figure in a large forested valley, with Belo Horizonte's skyline faintly visible in the distance. The roof carries solar panels, and the glazed bar emerges from the canopy instead of sitting in a cleared lawn. Considering the house's size, its visible footprint in the landscape is notably modest.

Galleries Framed by Mountains

Upstairs, the interiors stay quiet and let the glazing do the talking. A long gallery follows the curved glass wall, with polished concrete floors and room for art, including a leaning rusted steel beam and a carved root-wood seat. The sculptures echo the driftwood pieces placed around the pools below, so the collection connects inside and outside without much effort.

The kitchen and dining area turns in two directions. One glass wall looks onto a rough stone retaining wall and green hillside at close range; the corner glazing at the dining table opens to the distant mountain line. That contrast between near and far views is the house's spatial theme in miniature, and it is more interesting than a single panoramic window would have been.

Private Rooms Inside the Concrete

The two primary suites sit in the elevated volume facing the mountain panorama, and the bedroom photographs show how much the board-formed concrete softens at domestic scale. A curved wall carries the timber grain behind a steel-clad bedhead, and afternoon sun through the blinds stripes the surface. Opposite the bed, a full-height glass wall and a tripod telescope make the view the main event.

The washroom is the best small space in the house. Set inside one of the pillars, it is a board-formed concrete chamber with a faceted stone basin and an open skylight framing tree branches overhead. Inside a structural core, where you would expect a windowless box, the architects found a room that looks up into the forest.

Plans and Drawings

The plans confirm the three-armed logic. The ground level is mostly landscape, with reflecting pools, the pool, an open kitchen, outdoor dining and a wine cellar arranged around a central terrace with trees left standing. The second floor is a Y-shaped figure holding the suites, kitchen, living and dining rooms, each arm reaching toward its own view. Above it, the roof becomes a planted terrace, while the spa and gym sit in a separate volume set into the forest.

The section is the clearest single drawing of the project. The long glazed volume cantilevers over the slope while stairs and angled stone walls follow the terrain below, untouched. A cave on the site is also reserved for a future winery and cheese cellar, which extends the idea of using what the ground already offers rather than excavating it.

Why This Project Matters

Xingu House is a large, expensive private residence, and it would be easy to dismiss it on those grounds. But its central argument applies at any budget: read the site before you redraw it. TETRO kept the plateaus, the walls and the forest fragments, then designed a structure that needs only six points of contact to work. The decision to load those six points with services, circulation and wet rooms is a lesson in how a restrained footprint can generate the architecture instead of limiting it.

It also belongs to a long Brazilian tradition of raised concrete houses that free the ground beneath them, while updating it with irregular, almost geological supports and a far more careful attitude toward existing terrain. Not every move is new, and the project's polish sometimes edges toward showpiece. Still, the relationship between inherited stone, suspended concrete and water is resolved with real conviction, and that is rarer than it should be.

Xingu House by TETRO Arquitetura (Carlos Maia, Débora Mendes, Igor Macedo), Nova Lima, Brazil. Area: 1,800 m². Completed 2025. Photography by Nelson Kon.

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