ASPIREDESIGNANDHOME.COM 63 62 SUMMER 2026 The cylindrical enclosure with the oval window conceals the kitchen. To the right, by the sliders, are a bench with a bird head and a ritualistic “straw man,” both by local Indigenous artisans. Over the dining table are two 1960s pendants salvaged from a demolished Amsterdam building. Janet Vollebregt Alto Paraíso de Goiás, Brazil home practice A rchitect and artist Janet Vollebregt first came to Brazil from her native Netherlands to design a hotel, a project that eventually fizzled. But she and husband Xavier de Bode traveled the country long enough to fall in love with a hillside farm in Alto Paraíso de Goiás, a highland savannah in central Brazil. Reluctant to move across an entire ocean and hemisphere, however, they returned home, only to be drawn back a short while later to purchase a 54-acre plot with an old house on it. “The first three years I found very heavy, very different from my life in Amsterdam in high heels,” Vollebregt recalls. “I had to get used to all the animals. We slept in the old adobe farmhouse on mattresses on the floor. But after meeting my first tarantula, I never did it again.” De Bode undertook reforesting the land, while Vollebregt began applying her feng shui master skills and her studies in the Japanese energy-healing art of Jin Shin Jyutsu (for which she is a mentor) to envision a healing retreat called O.Sítio. “I wanted to integrate energy and what you feel in a space,” she explains about the compound she would eventually design. “Energy and poetry of a space or object are what count.” Today, there are three buildings. The original farmhouse was refurbished in 2006 but eventually “eaten by nature,” Vollebregt relates. She wanted its 2150-square- foot replacement to have a “respect for the history of the place.” So in 2022, and after the birth of their children, Zeus and Zahir Amazona, Vollebregt and de Bode erected Casa Arco do Sítio on the site, a stucco-and-clay tile structure whose name refers to the many arched doorways that punctuate the spaces. P H O T O G R A P H Y F I L I P P O B A M B E R G H I One of Vollebregt’s pendant pieces hangs between two paintings inspired by Brazilian street art, the one on the left of a spaceship with astronauts (referencing the area’s famous celestial events). On the table is Vollebregt’s Cosmic Egg. Casa Alto Paraíso, with its locally harvested stone walls, expansive veranda, and a roofline that mimics the incline of the mountain ridge.