Preserving the Last Trace

In Itaipava, nestled in the Fluminense highlands of Rio de Janeiro state, architect Lucas Jimeno Dualde has completed the transformation of an old stable from the São João de Icaraí Farm into a contemporary country residence. Long neglected, the structure stood as the sole remaining vestige of the property's agricultural past. According to architectural media, the project drew attention for treating the site's memory and topography as the very starting point of design — going well beyond conventional renovation.

Why It Matters

The project's central question was precise: how do you convert an agricultural space into a modern home without erasing the land itself? This speaks directly to a broader architectural trend. Adaptive reuse of historic rural structures is gaining momentum globally, and the measure of success increasingly lies not just in what is preserved physically, but in how a building's relationship with its surrounding landscape is maintained. Dualde's approach — treating the dialogue between structure, nature, past, and present as a design language — positions this project as a meaningful example of that movement.

From Farm to Home: A Lineage

In the mid-twentieth century, Brazil's rural highlands were dotted with large farms and their auxiliary buildings. The Fluminense mountain region around Itaipava was a hub of coffee farming and cattle ranching, and many of the stables and storage structures from that era have since fallen into ruin. This particular stable, nearly 80 years old, survived while the rest of the farm complex disappeared, left as an isolated volume amid dense vegetation. For Dualde, the project began before any design work: the land, the surrounding flora, the weight of eight decades — all were design conditions. Such attempts to bridge rural heritage and contemporary living have been a persistent thread in Latin American architecture.