Xingu House by TETRO is a 1,800 m2 residence in Nova Lima, Brazil, where three elevated wings negotiate an irregular mountain site through cantilevered concrete slabs, inhabited structural pillars, stone retaining walls, reflecting pools, and a detached spa embedded within preserved Atlantic Forest vegetation.
Xingu House Technical Information
- Architects: TETRO
- Location: Nova Lima, Minas Gerais, Brazil
- Gross Area: 1,800 m2 | 19,375 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years: 2025
- Photographs: © Nelson Kon
Xingu House is built as a continuous dialogue between topography, structure, and experience, resting on sculptural pillars, following the terrain, opening to the landscape, and allowing nature to pass through its voids.
– TETRO
Reading the Mountain Site
Xingu House begins with the specific resistance of its site: an 8,000 m2 plot composed of natural plateaus, older stone retaining walls, and fragments of preserved forest on a mountainside in Nova Lima, near Belo Horizonte. Rather than flattening this terrain into a conventional platform, the project treats the slope as a spatial and structural guide. The house is organized through contact, suspension, and partial detachment, producing a domestic landscape that is neither fully embedded nor fully autonomous.
The three wings of the main volume extend toward distinct conditions of view and vegetation. One projects toward the mountain panorama, another addresses the upper contour of the site, and a third opens to the forested garden and distant urban horizon. This distribution gives the plan a topographic logic: orientation is not only a question of solar exposure or scenic framing, but a way of measuring the relationship between the body of the house and the uneven ground below.
The building’s most significant site response lies in its selective contact with the terrain. Existing stone walls support and define parts of the approach, while cantilevered slabs move beyond them to hover above water, planting, and slope. The result is a sustained tension between excavation and elevation. From below, the house appears to lean against the mountain at a few concentrated points; from within, the glass perimeter and curving plan maintain a continuous visual exchange with the hillside.
Structure as Spatial and Sculptural Framework
The structural system is organized around six large board-formed concrete pillars that support the elevated wings. These elements are not treated as neutral supports. Their thick, asymmetrical profiles expand, contract, and twist as they meet the soffits, producing an undercroft with a strong spatial character. The board-formed texture registers the imprint of timber formwork across pillars, slabs, ceilings, and interior walls, making structure and surface part of the same material field.
Several of the pillars are inhabited, containing stairs, bathrooms, an elevator, and service functions. This strategy complicates the usual separation between support and program. The cores carry load, organize circulation, and shape the spatial sequence beneath the house. Their faceted volumes read almost like geological figures, especially where they rise from black, reflective pools and are set against reddish laterite walls or pale dry-stacked stone.
The cantilevered concrete slabs and curved soffits reinforce the impression of a building suspended over its site. Yet the project avoids a purely technical display of structural bravado. The underside of the house is not a residual zone but one of its primary architectural spaces, where compression, reflection, shadow, and axial movement converge. The monolithic character of the concrete gives continuity to this experience, while the changing geometry of the pillars prevents the system from becoming repetitive.
Program, Circulation, and Domestic Organization
The elevated level is divided into three wings, each linked to a different domestic role and landscape orientation. The highest point, approximately six meters above the natural grade, contains the two main suites, arranged as long viewing rooms toward the mountains. Other wings accommodate the living room, guest bedrooms, office, and kitchen, with glazed facades and curved edges that soften the boundary between interior rooms and exterior contour lines.
Below, the leisure level remains in direct contact with the ground. The pool terrace, bar, lounge areas, water mirrors, and planted basins form an open platform beneath and beside the hovering concrete mass. An existing underground gallery on the site is incorporated as a wine cellar, introducing a trace of earlier occupation into the new domestic arrangement. This reuse gives the lower level a temporal depth that contrasts with the formal clarity of the elevated wings.
Circulation unfolds as an extended sequence rather than a single route. Bridges link the wings, stairs cross reflecting pools, and galleries slide along curved glass walls. Movement alternates between enclosed concrete passages, exposed cantilevered edges, and shaded undercroft spaces where water and stone define the ground plane. The house therefore frames the landscape not only through windows but through successive changes in level, material contact, and bodily orientation.
Material Atmosphere, Landscape, and Environmental Continuity
The material palette is restrained but texturally dense. Board-formed concrete establishes the structural and atmospheric base, while stone walls anchor the house to the existing terrain. Travertine paving extends across terraces, stairs, and pool edges, mediating between the mineral character of the site and the precision of the new construction. Glass and metal screening introduce lighter layers, with full-height glazing opening the social areas and brise soleil elements tempering the exposure of the suites.
Water plays an architectural role beyond leisure. Black reflecting pools beneath the cantilevers amplify the presence of the concrete pillars, while planted water gardens introduce papyrus, broad-leaf vegetation, and sculptural root forms into the shaded undercroft. These elements are not applied as decoration; they transform the space below the house into a humid, reflective threshold between architecture and forest. The detached spa, placed among preserved trees, extends this logic by locating part of the domestic program within the canopy rather than beside it.
Environmental integration is expressed through both performance and atmosphere. Large glazed surfaces maximize views but are moderated by overhangs, louvers, and the depth of the concrete soffits. Green roof areas and solar panels are integrated into the roofscape, reducing the visual impact of the building when seen from above and acknowledging the ecological sensitivity of the Atlantic Forest setting. The house remains substantial in scale, but its spatial organization allows vegetation, water, air, and shadow to pass through and around its constructed mass.
About TETRO
TETRO is a Brazilian architecture firm based in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. For Xingu House in Nova Lima, the studio developed an architecture shaped by a careful reading of the site, establishing a continuous dialogue between topography, structure, landscape, and domestic experience.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: MTF
- MEP consultants: C.A Engenharia; Grupo Orlando; Panair
- Landscape designers: Orsini Paisagismo
- Construction company: Hauz Engenharia
- Other contributors: Vertice; Viegas Acabamentos; Topseal; Mingrone; Lumisystem; Aludesing; Hunter Douglas; Mharmaros; Demuner; Ornare; Kitchens; Smart – Natan; TratMais Piscinas; Climax; Juliana Vasconcellos; Solar Volt; Technogym; Tulio Pinto; Nelson Kon
