The Lake House | Nova Lima, MG

INDOOR-OUTDOOR · TROPICAL BRUTALISM

Where concrete learned to dissolve into the landscape — and the pool moved indoors

The first image of The Lake House is what defines everything: the turquoise water of the pool extends almost to the kitchen counter, while the exposed concrete ceiling opens into skylights that pour natural light in irregular puddles onto the travertine floor. It's a house that rejected the boundary between inside and outside — and Marcato was called to inhabit this space with the same audacity as the architecture. Nothing could be conventional. Nothing was.

The kitchen is divided into two volumes with opposing intentions: the first, absolute black — matte lacquer cabinets, dark stone backsplash, integrated equipment tower — confronts the exterior luminosity with monolithic sobriety. The second volume, the service island, appears in white with under-counter lighting, creating a contrast that is both functional and extremely photogenic. The execution of this contrast required that the two cabinet columns be produced in separate batches, with independent tinting calibrations, to ensure that the black was exactly black and the white was exactly white — without deviation.

Through the industrial steel and glass frame in the background, the Nova Lima mountain range frames the scene like a living painting. The choice for ceiling-high cabinets — even in a space with a 4.20m ceiling height — was deliberate: any lower cabinet would look like store-bought furniture in this context. Marcato produced the pieces with invisible joints and no visible frames between modules, creating the illusion that each cabinet wall is a single monolithic piece. It's a technical trick that requires installation tolerances of less than 1mm.

It is rare for carpentry and architecture to meet with such scale precision. In The Lake House, the furniture doesn't fill the space — it participates in the conversation between the built and the natural. Every detail was calculated so that nothing competed with the view, and yet, everything had its own presence. The result is a project that will remain relevant decades from now — because it was built with conviction, not with trends.

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Project: Marcato Móveis · High-End Woodwork · Nova Lima, MG

See also: Casa Jardim · Casa SL · Casa Concreto