Casa Adentro is a 1,370-square-meter residence in Lagoa Santa, Minas Gerais, organized around the spaces left between mature trees. Designed by TETRO, the house uses courtyards, elevated volumes, and a continuous circulation loop to make preserved vegetation an active part of its spatial order.
Casa Adentro / Adentro House Technical Information
- ArchitectsTETRO
- LocationLagoa Santa, Minas Gerais, Brazil
- Gross Area1,370 m2 | 14,747 Sq. Ft.
- Project Year2024
- Photographs© Luisa Lage
What is not built is as important as what is built.
– TETRO
Building Through the Gaps in the Canopy
Casa Adentro occupies a 5,040-square-meter wooded plot in Lagoa Santa, near Belo Horizonte, through subtraction rather than territorial clearance. The project begins by identifying gaps between mature trees and placing built volumes within these intervals. This reverses the usual sequence of domestic planning, in which a predetermined footprint is imposed on a site and vegetation is subsequently accommodated around it. Here, the existing canopy establishes the house’s initial geometry.
The extensive 1,370-square-meter program is distributed primarily across one level, allowing the residence to extend laterally through the forest rather than consolidate into a compact vertical object. Its horizontal arrangement preserves visual and physical proximity to the ground while treating trees as fixed spatial markers. In plans and models, each existing trunk is registered as an obstacle and a reference point, producing notches, courtyards, and shifts in the perimeter that resist a uniformly rectilinear enclosure.
The site falls significantly across its wooded terrain. Where the slope drops away, portions of the house are lifted on slender supports, allowing the planted ground plane to continue beneath cantilevered concrete volumes. This selective elevation reduces the need for continuous earthworks and retaining structures while giving the building a measured detachment from the terrain. The house reads less as a single object placed in a clearing than as a sequence of occupied platforms threaded through a pre-existing ecological field.
The Courtyard as an Organizing Void
A continuous rectangular route organizes the house’s social, private, guest, fitness, and leisure spaces. Rather than functioning as a residual corridor, this circulation loop acts as the principal architectural device, connecting a dispersed program while maintaining its relation to the central open space. Movement around the perimeter makes the courtyard a constant reference, establishing orientation through recurring views of water, stone, foliage, and sky.
At the center of the composition, the principal courtyard combines a swimming pool, shallow reflecting pools, stone terraces, preserved trees, and a recessed fire pit. Water is used not simply as an amenity but as a spatial register. Its dark surfaces extend the courtyard’s apparent depth, reflecting the tree canopy and the glazed elevations that enclose it. Pale stone paving forms bridges and peninsulas between water bodies, while cut-outs around tree trunks make the retained vegetation physically inseparable from the outdoor room.
Smaller courtyards continue this strategy beyond the central void. Bedrooms, guest rooms, the gym, and ancillary spaces are interrupted by planted pockets that admit daylight and frame controlled views. In the bathroom, a mature tree occupies an enclosed exterior court beside the bathing area, turning a conventional private room into a space shaped by seasonal change, bark, shadow, and the trunk’s scale. These voids divide the larger plan into distinct domestic territories without relying solely on internal partitions.
Calibrating Openness, Privacy, and Movement
The continuous circulation route changes character as it moves between programs. Along the social pavilion, full-height glazing opens the interior to the central courtyard, keeping living, dining, and cooking areas visually connected to water and vegetation. The corridor becomes an extension of the outdoor room, with reflections in the glass complicating the boundary between interior occupation and the forest beyond.
Near the bedrooms, the same path is compressed by board-formed concrete walls. These opaque planes provide acoustic and visual separation while concentrating attention on selected courtyards and framed openings. Privacy is therefore not treated as a complete withdrawal from the landscape. Instead, it is achieved through a more selective relationship to it, where views are narrowed, light is filtered, and the mass of concrete mediates between intimate rooms and the wooded site.
At the gym and guest areas, the route opens again toward the exterior. This alternation between glass, concrete, and open-air thresholds creates a sequence of changing exposure. A resident moves from broad collective views across the pool to sheltered passages alongside concrete, then back toward planted courts and more porous edges. The spatial experience depends on this repeated recalibration of enclosure rather than on a singular interior condition.
Structure and Material as Landscape Instruments
A mixed steel-and-concrete structural system supports the distinction between protected volumes and lighter glazed pavilions. Concrete forms the heavier, more private parts of the residence, while dark steel edge beams define rooflines, cantilevers, and the thin horizontal profiles of the more open spaces. The structural contrast is legible at the building’s underside, where dark beams and slender supports allow concrete boxes to project beyond their points of contact with the ground.
Board-formed concrete gives the opaque volumes a direct constructional texture. The regular panel grid and tie-hole pattern remain visible across exterior and interior surfaces, resisting the abstraction of a seamless finish. Under the canopy, moving leaf shadows continually alter these surfaces. The trees therefore act as a changing environmental screen, casting temporal patterns onto walls that might otherwise read as static and defensive.
Timber-lined soffits and ceilings temper the harder material palette at sheltered exterior zones and within the social interiors. In the kitchen, a dark veined stone island stands against board-formed concrete beneath a warm timber ceiling, while clerestory glazing introduces filtered daylight along the room’s upper edge. Across the project, stone paving, black steel, glazing, water, concrete, and timber form a restrained material palette whose differences clarify the relationship between dense mass, structural span, reflective surface, and preserved void.
About TETRO
TETRO is an architecture firm based in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Its approach to Casa Adentro is grounded in reading the voids between existing trees, using courtyards, continuous circulation, and a mixed steel-and-concrete structure to preserve vegetation and organize the relationship between built volumes and open space.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: M Gomes Engenharia
- MEP consultants: M Gomes Engenharia, hydraulic and electrical systems
- Landscape designers: Raiz da Terra
- Construction company: M Gomes Engenharia
- Other contributors: Guilherme Castro, Leandro Caram, Daniele Meloni, Deborah Martins, Bianca Carvalho, Luisa Lage, Sabrina Freitas, Carolina Amaral
- Windows: M Gomes Engenharia
