Nearly 500 miles from the high-rise apartment that Ralph Weigand and Maurício Uhle share in São Paulo sits a modest, prefabricated cabin, nestled deep in one of southern Brazil’s verdant forests.

The structure is simple—a one-story rectangular box of cross-laminated timber wrapped in powder-coated steel—but its floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto the complex ecosystem of the Curucaca Valley.

Spanning subtropical woodlands and higher-elevation plains, the geological basin is a thick tangle of forests, trails, waterfalls, and a wildlife corridor stalked by pumas and pampas foxes. Ralph and Maurício’s land, which they found while visiting family in nearby Florianópolis, represents a striking counterpoint to their life in São Paulo’s urban jungle, where Ralph works as a sales manager at Eventbrite and Maurício is the business director at a hospital.

“We wanted to escape the vibration of the city and enjoy a kind of visual detox,” Ralph says of their desire for a quiet place to spend weekends and holidays. “Simplicity is important to us.”

As soon as they acquired the land, they began exploring how best to develop it. From hundreds of miles away, even rudimentary construction projects can be daunting, and Maurício and Ralph had high architectural standards. Most of all, they were adamant that the work not disturb the surrounding trees. While flipping through a fashion magazine, the couple came across a modular home by MAPA Architects, a binational firm based in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Porto Alegre, Brazil. They quickly realized that building off-site would allow them to minimize their impact on the forested property.

The home Maurício and Ralph had seen belongs to a series of small, customizable cabins that MAPA calls Minimod, all designed to live lightly on the land. “We created the prototype to explore the possibilities of prefab construction in relationship to remote landscapes,” says MAPA architect Diego Morera. The four units the firm had completed at that point ranged in size from 300 to about 500 square feet, each built of cross-laminated timber, a lightweight yet durable product made by stacking layers of structural lumber boards crosswise and gluing them together.

At 1,050 square feet, Ralph and Maurício’s retreat is by far the largest Minimod the firm has built to date, though the architects needed some convincing before they agreed to do it. “They kept telling us, ‘You have no kids, no dogs—you don’t need more space,’” remembers Ralph, “but we wanted to have room for people to visit.”

The house took 90 days to build at a factory near São Paulo and was then transported in three shipments on flatbed trucks and assembled on-site. From design to completion, the project took approximately a year.

Although Ralph and Maurício’s cabin is larger than previous Minimods, its ecological impact has still been relatively small. “Even just a few months after the residence was ready, it felt integrated with nature,” Ralph says. “We disturbed only a few trees in the process.”

Indeed, the house takes up just a tiny fraction of the site, which is about eight acres, although the couple haven’t bothered to map its boundaries. “It’s preserved as part of the wildlife corridor,” Ralph notes. “We don’t need to know where the extra acreage is to appreciate the role it plays.”

Related Reading: A Remote Prefab in Uruguay Is Completely Self-Sufficient

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: MAPA Architects / @mapaarq

General contracting and structural engineering: CROSSLAM

Electrical engineering: Roberto Silvestrin

MEP engineering: Júlio César Troleis

Cabinetry design: Sandrin Planejados

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A Brazilian Couple’s Prefab Cabin Is the Perfect Outpost for Forest Bathing