Rising energy bills and hotter summers are real concerns. One home in Brazil shows how thoughtful design can address those issues head-on, while still giving residents a breezy escape into nature.
Featured in Designboom, Casa Guapuruvus is part cozy retreat, part lab experiment, and it's a blueprint for forward-thinking home design.
This summer home, designed by São Paulo-based architecture studio Cornetta Arquitetura, serves as a real-life experiment on how we could build homes without harming the environment.
Casa Guapuruvus feels like a treehouse — but it has all the modern amenities of a luxurious vacation home. It has floor-to-ceiling views of the forest, a solarium, and a lap pool built right next to tree lines. Followers of Cornetta Arquitetura on Instagram call the home a paradise.
What sets this home apart is how it was built. The architects were intentional about keeping most of the forest untouched. They chose a spot that had already been used and had the least amount of vegetation. Overall, more than 70% of the land was preserved.
Aside from minimizing their environmental footprint, they also streamlined construction to reduce waste, time, and labour.
They laid the groundwork with solid, old-school masonry and constructed the main structure with prefabricated pieces crafted from timber and light steel. The result? A house that's modern, functional, and more climate-friendly than your average vacation home.
Casa Guapuruvus is part of a growing trend in architecture that aims to minimize ecological impact during construction.
Similar projects, such as the TECLA 3D-printed clay house in Italy and the Pinkney Neighborhood House designed by students, show that future-forward homes can be affordable, energy-efficient, and environmentally restorative.
Homes like this show that the future is already here. We can start reducing our footprint by being mindful of how we consume our resources.
Upgrading to a heat pump water heater reduces energy use. Installing solar panels puts less strain on the grid and can reduce power bills to at or near $0. To further cut costs, use EnergySage to compare quotes from vetted local installers of solar panels and save up to $10,000 on installation — you can help the planet and your wallet at the same time.
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