In Canela’s mountain forest, 0E1 Arquitetos built House in Canela to the smallest footprint the site’s building code would allow, using that limit to spare the trees rather than clear them. Commissioned as a weekend retreat and short-term rental for a family of two couples, the house occupies a 500 sqm sloping plot that drops roughly 10 meters to the chosen building site and 15 meters across the full lot. That gradient, paired with a mandate to disturb as little forest as possible, shaped nearly every decision that followed.
A forest-first brief guided the commission from the start. The owners, a family with a strong interest in architecture who stayed involved through every discussion and decision, wanted a compact, self-sufficient house that could comfortably sleep two couples with real independence between bedrooms, all within roughly 120 sqm of built area. To translate that brief into a light steel frame structure suited to a forested slope, they invited the Brazilian studio 0E1 Arquitetos.
Before design began, a multidisciplinary team of biologists and surveyors carried out a full site analysis, mapping the vegetation and classifying trees as native or exotic. That survey identified the only existing clearing on the lot, and the house was sited there, minimizing tree removal and avoiding major earthworks. The built area, at 120 sqm, represents the condominium’s minimum buildable footprint — achieved without felling a single tree, by reducing the house’s lateral setbacks instead.
Set on a square footprint of 10.8 x 10.8 meters, the plan arranges its rooms dynamically within that regular grid in a pinwheel configuration. The living room sits at the center as the organizational core, with two independent suites, a kitchen, service area, barbecue zone, and terraces radiating outward — a layout built to balance communal gathering with private retreat for two couples sharing one roof.
The steep terrain dictated the structural approach as much as the plan did. Resting on a concrete base that levels the natural gradient of this steeply sloped site, the house reads as a lightweight volume poised above the slope — a solution not unlike the way Architektura’s Jevany Villa turns a steep Czech hillside into a choreographed structural descent. 0E1 Arquitetos chose a light steel frame specifically for its lightness and speed: it eliminated the need for concrete mixers on site, minimized soil and vegetation disturbance, and rested on a leveling slab that kept the site clean through construction.
A borrowed industrial skin wraps the exterior: trapezoidal sandwich panels, a cladding typically reserved for industrial buildings, cover the walls and roof at a domestic scale. The panels offer high thermal and acoustic performance and low maintenance, and rather than disguising the steel frame as conventional masonry, the house lets its industrial construction show. Recessed, floor-to-ceiling windows, 2.4 meters high, punctuate the dark-toned facades, creating a sequence of planes that deepens the sense of depth against the surrounding trees.
Inside, the material palette splits into two visual planes. Up to 2.4 meters, walls stay white and continue through doors and terrace openings; above that line, Tauari wood panels follow the pitch of the exposed roof slope, with black metal trim marking the transitions — an approach to interior warmth that recalls the spruce-lined “cave” interior of Mimosa Architects’ cabin on the Sázava River, where a similarly dark shell opens onto a wood-wrapped core. A black slate floor, cut from 40 x 40 cm slabs into 10 x 40 cm pieces to form a parquet-like pattern, ties the interior back to the dark exterior finish.
An asymmetrical roof culminates in a skylight at its highest point, the only place in the house with a direct view of the sky. Inside dense forest cover, that opening does real work: it supplies consistent daylight, traces shifting patterns of light and shadow through the day, and lets the exposed roof slope stand in for a false ceiling, keeping the timber structure visible overhead. A wood-burning stove anchors the living room below, elevated about two meters off the ground and opening onto a terrace with a hidden staircase down to the garden.
Sixty-four steps carry visitors up the slope to reach the house, each one adjusted on site to wind around the same roots and trees the biologists cataloged before construction began. Centrally supported to create a subtle cantilever, the staircase gives the climb the impression of floating just above the forest floor. Started in 2021 and completed in 2024 after a lengthy approval process, the build took roughly two months to found and two weeks to frame in steel, before months of closures and finishes settled it into its clearing. Underfoot, the black slate flooring is already picking up a greenish patina from the mountain humidity — a quiet reminder that the forest 0E1 Arquitetos worked so hard not to disturb is still, slowly, working its way back in.
House in Canela by 0E1 Arquitetos | Location: Canela, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil — Year: 2024 — Key materials: light steel frame, trapezoidal sandwich panels, Tauari wood, black slate flooring, basalt countertops