Source: New York Times
MANAUS, Brazil — It wasn’t the snakes and scorpions that horrified Sandra Santos back in 1996 when her husband, Edson Costa, first showed her the potential weekend getaway, a wooden home on stilts on two acres of Amazonian rainforest. It was the dark, gloomy, off-the-grid structure itself.“I was disgusted,” she said. “It was ugly. Very ugly. Completely destroyed.” A massive storm that coincided with their visit, sending water gushing through the ground floor exposed on four sides to the wind and rain, didn’t help.
The odd 1978 construction, stuck somewhere between traditional Amazonian river dweller home and ski lodge, was being sold by Robert Schuster, an Austrian who had made a life for himself here in Manaus, a city of 1.7 million 1,100 miles northwest of Brasilia, the largest city in the Amazon.
Originally accessible only by boat via an offshoot of the Tarumã River that runs along the property line, the house was, by 1996 a half-hour drive from the couple’s high-rise apartment in the 1.7 million-person capital of Amazonas state. It had been designed by a well-known Brazilian architect, Severiano Mário Porto, but Mr. Schuster had take some odd measures to “care for” it, like smearing the wood with burnt diesel fuel to protect it from termites (which turned it black and gloomy, though did keep the insects at bay).
It took Mr. Costa the better part of a six-day vacation to Aruba trying to convince Ms. Santos, but in the end, he won. And so did she. A former bank manager who had left her career to raise their two daughters, the task of renovating the house led her to discover a hidden talent she had for creating mosaics and a flair for interior decorating that helped lead her out of a major depression and into a new career.
The house the couple bought for $150,000 was built from an array of Amazonian hardwoods: an itaúba floor, buriti railings and angelim-rajado walls to name a few of the materials used, all from the region.
It has four staggered stories built over the mostly exposed ground floor living area, which aside from wicker furniture, features three white hammocks for catching the cross-breeze, and a wine cellar for enjoying it.
The couple began a renovation project that would last more than four years and, including the purchase of adjoining lots to buffer their land from encroaching development, cost $1.5 million.
Just sanding off the diesel stains to restore the wood’s original look took eight carpenters 13 months of manual work. Mr. Costa refused to use electric sanders to give the house a more rustic feel.
Guests must take their shoes off when they come in, but not for the traditional reasons. “Without that, you won’t have the pleasure of feeling the wood on your feet,” he said.
The couple also opened up the kitchen area to the dining area and glassed in the partially open walls in the master bedroom (because, unlike Mr. Schuster, they preferred not to share their chambers with the local bat population).
Fanciful bird and fish carvings, figures made from papier-mâché, now hang from the rafters, adding a shot of color, but the house’s main piece of artistic fauna is a realistic grayish-brown sloth carving climbing a pillar with a baby peering over its shoulder.
Mr. Costa commissioned it from the local artist José de Moura Alcântara . Many mistake it for a work of taxidermy. The sloth gave their retreat its name: Sítio da Preguiça, which can translate either as Sloth Ranch or Ranch of Laziness.
Aside from the master bedroom, there is a bedroom for their daughters, and a third room that served as a playroom while their daughters were growing up (one is now in college and the other just returned from a high school year abroad in New Zealand). They also built a separate guest house with four small rooms, furnished with pairs of rough-hewn twin beds made from trees taken down to build the house.
Ms. Santos gave each room a different theme: sun and moon, fish, indigenous, and nautical — featuring a model of the Titanic. (Her discovered passion for creating mosaics led to a workshop and store she now owns in Manaus.)
On the river, they built a deck area with a sky-blue railing and a small pool, a glassed-in sauna and a pier for boats and jet skis.
But there is trouble in Slothville. The federally protected forest across the water is under attack from land grabbers who clear-cut and burn the trees and then claim territory as their own, hoping to cash in from developers as Manaus expands.
Even with a glass of wine in hand, herons flying by and bossa nova playing from a hidden speaker system, Mr. Costa grows enraged when he sees smoke rising across the water.
He is not overly optimistic about the future of his jungle dream home.
“As a paradise, its days might be numbered,” he said.
Since he said that, however, the police and federal justice system have begun to take some action, expelling some of the illegal settlers. Though he is not overly optimistic about the future of the land across the river, he has already been dreaming about turning one of the high porches into an office for when he retires from his advertising job. From up there, he would be able to watch the Amazonian rain pelting the ground from above, just like he did the first time he saw the property back in 1996. It was what hooked him to a gloomy, leaky home in the jungle. “It’s forest rain,” he said. “It was a different sensation, watching the rain fall from above, from the viewpoint of animals who live in the trees. I get goose bumps when I think about it.”