The village of São Miguel do Gostoso has always been remote. Cut off by the caatinga, a huge swath of semiarid land stretching into the Atlantic Ocean at Brazil’s easternmost point, the coastal town was accessible only by horseback as recently as the 1960s. Architect Pep Pons got there in 2011, while taking what he thought would be a sabbatical from his job in Zurich.

Although the caatinga has a long history of isolation, poverty, and exploitation, Pons found the 4,000-person fishing village in the midst of a renaissance, transforming itself into a thriving resort town. Where the caatinga meets the ocean, it turns out, consistently hot equatorial temperatures and southeasterly trade winds are the stuff of epic wind-surfing vacations.

While Pons was enjoying his respite, he was perhaps unwittingly drumming up business. One acquaintance asked him to sketch a house; a fellow visitor from Switzerland wondered whether Pons would conceive a courtyard residence from scratch. He apprised Matteo Arnone, his best friend from Accademia di Architettura Mendrisio, of the opportunities that had found him.

The news prompted Arnone to want to experience the energy for himself, and the same day that Arnone stepped off the plane, Pons’s Swiss prospect greenlit the commission. The buddies established Atelier Branco Arquitetura to get it done.

Though they had based themselves some 1,800 miles away in São Paulo, the newly minted partners maintained strong ties to São Miguel do Gostoso, working on the courtyard residence and developing their own 12-unit condominium. “We could spend a week or even just a weekend there, but we also could stay for more than four weeks,” Pons recalls of going back and forth. “We needed a place to be and work.”

By January 2017, he and Arnone had had enough of bunking with clients and renting tourist rooms. They peeled approximately 11,000 square feet of land from a friend’s 49-acre oceanfront farm to build a 1,720-square-foot satellite office and crash pad they named Casa Modico. Because the caatinga had not offered a memorable feature to design around, Atelier Branco chose a simple gable-sided form for the home.

“People who grew up here can be surprised by the exterior of the house, but inside they don’t feel like they’re in a spaceship. They can relate it to their own homes.”
—Pep Pons, architect

To make the design their own, they looked to an impressive piece of domestic material. The previous year, a supplier to the condominium project had gifted the partners a 23-foot-long slab of piquí-preto that had been salvaged from the floor of a responsibly managed rain forest. The sturdy, raw-edged wood surface begged to become a dining table. So the architects divided Casa Modico into two asymmetric volumes flanking a dining courtyard.

With the region’s climate and remoteness leaving it largely untouched by modern design developments, local techniques have endured and, in fact, have become an asset. “We’re not interested in transplanting cosmopolitan rules from São Paulo, because they would never fit here,” Pons says.

São Miguel do Gostoso houses have very few windows, to keep out extreme weather conditions, and they have large verandas where residents perform most of their daily activities when the weather is favorable. Arnone and Pons borrowed these ideas and kept openings in the walls to a minimum while extending the rear of Casa Modico toward the ocean via an elevated terrace. It encircles a flamboyant tree that provides dappled shade.

The two structures comprise brick walls and enamel-fired ceramic roof tiles. The project crews included adept bricklayers, so Arnone and Pons conceived an unusually open English bond pattern for interior walls: The gaps between header bricks are a kind of fretwork, allowing daylight and ventilation to move through the space.

Atelier Branco has gained even more new commissions to justify the expense of completing Casa Modico. Currently the studio is at work on another residence and two hospitality projects in São Miguel do Gostoso, and the architects’ farmer neighbor is marketing Casa Modico as the model house for five more.

As of deadline, Arnone and Pons had spent five weeks self-quarantining in Casa Modico, running the studio from an improvised living room setup as the novel coronavirus ravages the country. They are not sure when visitors will be able to safely travel to the region again, but they’re hoping for a quick return of windsurfers and the burgeoning tourism industry.

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Atelier Branco Arquitetura / @atelierbranco

Landscape Design: Julieta Fialho / @julietafialho

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