- Project: Casa Attico
- Architect: Matteo Arnone
- Location: Brazil, Sao Miguel Do Gostoso
- Year: 2023
- Photography: Federico Cairoli
A Sculptural Wind House on Brazil’s Northeastern Shore
On the luminous coast of São Miguel do Gostoso, Casa Attico by Atelier Matteo Arnone rises lightly from the dunes—an architectural dialogue between wind, sand, and sea.
Here, wind and clouds are not just environmental forces but structural collaborators, shaping the home’s form, materials, and spirit.
Elevated just above the undulating landscape, Casa Attico captures sweeping ocean views while remaining intimately tied to its terrain. It is both a landmark and a retreat, an object of calm geometry immersed in movement and air.
Concept & Environmental Response
Matteo Arnone’s design begins with the site’s most powerful element — the wind. São Miguel do Gostoso, known for its year-round breezes, demanded an architecture that could breathe, move, and cool naturally.
Rather than resisting these conditions, Casa Attico transforms them into design drivers.
The ground floor functions as a wind machine — its patios, walls, and voids organized to direct and diffuse airflow throughout the structure. From the east-facing façade, breezes enter through geometric courtyards, flowing into the bedrooms and dissipating across the plan.
The tower’s double brick façade operates as a passive ventilation system, where air rises between two structural layers, continuously refreshing the building envelope. In this way, climate becomes architecture, and architecture becomes climate.
Spatial Composition & Vertical Experience
The house is divided into three levels, each articulating a different relationship with nature and intimacy:
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Ground Floor:
Four symmetrically arranged bedrooms flank the central kitchen pavilion, which serves as both social heart and environmental regulator. Surrounded by four patios, the kitchen controls light, airflow, and sightlines across the entire floor. -
First Floor:
A circular opening above the kitchen establishes a visual and spatial link with the upper living and office area. This connection allows light and air to move freely between levels, reinforcing the house’s openness and unity. -
Top Floor:
A small, contemplative space crowns the structure — a private retreat offering panoramic views of the sea and the vast northeastern sky. It embodies the project’s conceptual crescendo: a place of solitude suspended between earth and atmosphere.
Materiality & Form
Casa Attico’s material palette reflects tactile honesty and climatic intelligence:
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Brick and concrete provide thermal mass, regulating interior temperatures and responding to the harsh coastal sun.
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Natural ventilation voids replace mechanical cooling, creating comfort through movement rather than machinery.
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The earth-toned exterior mirrors the color of the dunes, while the elevated volume lightly touches the terrain, ensuring minimal environmental disturbance.
Arnone’s architecture balances mass and void, solidity and porosity, sculpting air as much as form. The result is an architecture that feels built by the wind itself — quiet yet animated, rational yet poetic.
Light, Wind & Living
Every element in Casa Attico is tuned to the movement of air and light.
The east-to-west orientation channels prevailing breezes through patios, courtyards, and voids, while subtle variations in wall geometry break and soften airflow. As the day progresses, the house performs like a living organism — breathing, glowing, and adapting to its environment.
From dawn’s diffuse light to sunset’s golden reflections, the home offers an ever-changing choreography of shadow, breeze, and warmth.
Casa Attico by Atelier Matteo Arnone is a meditation on lightness and life within motion. It redefines tropical modernism not as a stylistic exercise, but as a response to nature’s most essential forces — wind, sun, and sea.
Suspended between land and sky, the house captures the spirit of its place with elegant restraint. It stands as a monument to climate-conscious design, where air becomes architecture, and architecture becomes an instrument of atmosphere.
