How To Make Your City Apartment Feel Like An Idyllic Tropical Villa

Integrating the outdoors and indoors in a seamless spatial transition was key to making this Brazilian city apartment feel like an idyllic tropical villa. MELODY BAY discovers more.

- Melody Bay

This home sits in a modernist, late ’60s apartment complex in downtown Belo Horizonte, Brazil, but you wouldn’t know it after crossing the threshold.

Designed by Juliana Lima Vasconcellos with a reconfigured open space that integrates the outdoors and indoors, it feels more like a house than an apartment. Being on the first floor helped as it has the luxury of being surrounded by an open private area.

Juliana turned the outside area into a spacious garden, complete with a pool, wooden deck and plenty of verdant greenery for shade and to create privacy from the surrounding buildings. The effect is that of living in a tropical villa. “[The garden] softens the coldness of the concrete in the surroundings,” she says. It’s a beautiful view that’s readily appreciated from many angles – which is why Juliana opened up the rest of the home.