A single tree rooted in a rock on a sloped grassland at 1,530 metres near Cunha, in Brazil, gave Arquipélago Arquitetos and Mariana Caires the one fixed point around which Casa Fazenda Bocaina turns.
Terra Nostra Farm sits at 1,530 metres, on mountainous grassland near the Serra da Bocaina National Park in Cunha, in the state of São Paulo. The brief asked for a family house and the auxiliary buildings a small-scale artisanal cheese operation needs, on a site that opens onto an almost endless horizon: the valley below, the undulating Mantiqueira range in the distance, and the Paraitinga River running clear at the property's edge.
Against that vastness, Arquipélago Arquitetos and Mariana Caires looked for something small to hold onto. They found it in a solitary tree rooted in a rock in the middle of the sloped grassland, a natural landmark in the grassland landscape the studio calls the stone bonsai. The house answers it with what the two describe as “a gesture of lightness, almost suspension.” It rises just clear of the ground, so the terrain keeps its flow below, and it touches the land by one narrow footbridge beside the rock. “The material presence of the tree and the rock introduces a human scale to the immensity of the surroundings,” they write. “It is through this contrast that a place is formed.”
The structure is glued laminated timber, prefabricated under controlled conditions with João Pini and the team at ITA Engenharia em Madeira, who took on the structural design, built the components in its facility, and shipped them to the remote site for assembly by a specialised crew of carpenters. Nine portal frames carry the house on slender columns, fifteen by fifteen centimetres, spanning six metres, with diagonal struts and a tensioned bottom cable taking the floor loads and steadying the horizontal forces. The whole frame bends into an arch. That curve is not only an echo of the tree: at this altitude it resists lateral wind, and it trims the timber and steel bracing the building needs, which meant less material to haul to a place this hard to reach.
A steep gabled roof of ceramic tiles gives the section enough depth to hold spatial trusses, which carry the end modules symmetrically onto the outermost columns and let both ends cantilever free, a veranda at each tip. Inside, the layout is binuclear and strictly symmetrical. On one side of the central axis, two freestanding volumes define the uses: one in timber holds the kitchen, pantry and restroom, the other brings together a wood-burning stove, worktop and dining table. The living and dining areas share the open space between them, set only by where the furniture stands. On the other side, four bedrooms line a glazed corridor that frames the stone-bound tree, keeping the landmark in view.
From a distance the house reads as a single precise object testing what prefabricated timber can do. Up close it borrows from the region's vernacular buildings, its ceramic tile roof and wooden elements, some of the wood reclaimed peroba rosa. It rests on an existing stone and leaves the mountain beneath it as undisturbed as it can.
