André Becker's JQY House Rebuilds Beachfront Footprint with Two Fronts
Completed in 2023 on a Juqueí beachfront lot, the 500 m² JQY House by André Becker reuses an existing footprint, faces both street and sea, and shades itself with cantilevered slabs and biribas slats.
- Section
- Architecture
- Author
- By Marcus Bennett
- Filed
- Length
- 2 min read
Key takeaways
- JQY House by André Becker measures 500 m² and was completed in 2023 on a beachfront lot in Juqueí, Brazil.
- The house reuses the footprint of a previous construction, arranging living, dining, veranda, pool, and two upper suites toward the sea.
- Two solid side walls support a thin roof slab forming deep cantilevered terraces; biribas wooden slats provide shade and ventilation.
JQY House occupies the exact footprint of a previous construction, and that constraint shaped everything architect André Becker did with the 500-square-metre lot. Completed in 2023, the house sits on a beachfront plot in Juqueí, on Brazil's São Paulo coast, with the sand as the natural focal point of both layout and ambiance.
The program follows the view. Living room, dining room, veranda, pool, and two upper-floor suites all face the sea, arranged on a footprint subtly elevated above beach level. Reusing the old foundation allowed what the architects describe as "a generous, sprawling, and airy layout that maximizes the sea breeze for thermal comfort."
The house effectively has two fronts. The lot's configuration gives the building both a street face and a beach face, and Becker treated each differently.
From the street, visitors pass through an internal garden with a reflecting pool and glass louvers, which the architects say "create a pleasant microclimate throughout the ground floor." The front volume rises a single story and carries a generous green roof oriented toward the mountains, complete with its own reflecting pool and deck. This upper outdoor room forms an intimate counterpoint to the open ground-floor living room and veranda on the sea side — a deliberate strategy for a house the architects describe as "typically filled with family and friends, allowing parallel activities to happen comfortably for everyone."
On the beach side, the facade takes a different structural logic. Two solid side walls support a thin roof slab, producing deep, shaded, cantilevered terraces that buffer the interiors from direct sun. Wooden slats made of biribas run throughout the house, providing both shade and ventilation.
The transition to the landscape is graded rather than hard-edged. According to the architects, the generous pool and beachside garden "seamlessly and naturally transition the house to the sand, keeping the building discretely integrated into the coastal landscape."
The project's core moves — rebuilding on an existing footprint, splitting the house into street-facing and sea-facing outdoor rooms, and using structure itself as climate control — read as a model for beachfront lots where orientation and cross-ventilation matter more than floor area. Photography is by Ana Mello.
Original: images.adsttc.com
