CA House by Jacobsen Arquitetura is located in Braganca Paulista, Brazil. The home is designed around the site’s irregularities, solar exposure and amazing panoramic views, resulting in a soft “Z” shaped footprint, with glazings covering the length of the sides overlooking the pool and facing the views. To emphasize the views, the roof has a soft incline, radiating upward as though to embrace the panorama beyond.
Just as Z-shape has 3 distinct directions or in this case volumes, the design was divided into 3 distinct zones: social, private and service.
With the low side of the roof facing the front facade, the home presents a demure entrance, settling peacefully into the landscaping that surrounds it. The center volume is the social zone with the chimney appearing to punctuate the central axis point. The service wing is on the high side of the property and the bedroom wing on the low side.
A series of slender columns supports the private volume as it projects out and over the terrain.
While the social zone is covered in glazings both front and back, the service and private volumes are covered in screens of vertical articulated metallic panels that provide both privacy and natural light. The thin vertical brises are purposely arranged in an uneven pattern as though they where made of a soft and pliable material.
Just inside the front door, which is a beautiful solid wood feature, the foyer is designed as a long hallway that connects the three different legs of the “Z”.
The hallway allows the home’s glazings to continue along the front of the house while still allowing for intimate spaces in the both the private and service zones.
The hallway doors to the bedrooms are large and double and can be slid back into the walls, leaving the rooms completely open to the hall – or not.
The same vertical articulated metallic panels are used on the back side of the bedroom and service wings as are used on the front of the home.
While the two end wings do open up to the terrace out back, the terrace is decidedly narrower which creates a visual “stop” from the social section of the terrace.
The social zone can be completely opened up to the exterior via glazings that slide and stack off to one side.
The interior design of CA House includes feature furniture signed by Sergio Rodgrques, Carlos Mota and Monica Cintra.
The Ground floor plan.
The Lower floor plan.
Jacobsen Arquitetura
Photography by Leonardo Finotti
Designing a home on a site with irregular topography can be tricky to do and while Jacobsen Arquitetura used the slope of the land to design CA House in a zigzag resembling a “Z”, other architects prefer to take advantage of a sloped site by employing stepped architecture.
