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A Transparent Jungle Treehouse in Brazil

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Nitsche Arquitetos Associados designed this house located in Iporanga on Sao Paulo’s coast in Brazil.

The client wanted to experience the surrounding natural jungle, in a protected area of the original Atlantic Rainforest.

While disturbing the surrounding rainforest as little as possible, the client needed five bedrooms.

So the house has a tall footprint – making a tree house.

The upper floor accommodates five bedrooms, one for the couple, one each for three children and a guest bedroom.

The volume of the upper floor creates a shadow on the slab, and the architect used that shadow for the social area underneath.

Indeed, the sense of being in an open space under the real house is very palpable. Yet this underneath floor is entirely glassed in.

The intention was to minimize the difference between inner and outside space, making it work all as one integrated space.

“This “middle” floor is almost an open space” says the architect “protected on all sides by transparent temperate glass sliding panels, so the forest can be seen at all times”.

Upstairs, just the corner of a bed is seen at this end.

(Unfortunately there are no interior photos available of the more enclosed upper floor, containing the bathroom(s) and the bedrooms.)