Reserva das Aroeiras

History

Reserva das Aroeiras is the most recent chapter of a project that began half a century earlier. The place’s urban planning base — wide, deep canals, dry and wet marinas, squares, roads and communal areas — is credited, in the development’s own material, to the urban planner Harry James Colei, author in the 1970s of the Porto Bracuhy Tourist Complex. It was on this ready-made infrastructure that Reserva das Aroeiras was built: a spit of land on the Bracuhy peninsula, carved up and subdivided for a very specific public — the owner of a large vessel who wants the boat in sight of the house, not at a marina a few kilometres away.

The relationship with the water is the place’s one rigid rule. The condominium has frontages onto four different situations — the canal, the marina, the open sea of the bay and the Bracuí river estuary —, and the development’s material is explicit about the size it was meant to shelter: deep-draught boats, with figures of up to 160 feet cited in the project.

• Concept: a peninsula-condominium, in which practically every lot has a water frontage and the dock is part of the house’s programme, not an add-on.
• Trivia: there is a private conservation area for residents, with contemplation trails facing the Bracuí estuary; and the western bank of the estuary, next to the condominium, is a permanent, untouched conservation area — which guarantees that the view from that side will not change.

Architecture and aesthetics

Reserva das Aroeiras does not have an architecture: it has a commission. The lots are sold with the infrastructure, urban planning and landscaping ready, and it falls to each owner to hire their own architect — the development’s own material closes its presentation with a line that is, in practice, the place’s policy: the spaces and the infrastructure have been created, now it is the architects’ turn. The result, in the houses already built, is a fairly homogeneous contemporary repertoire: horizontal volumes with deep eaves, double-height living rooms, wide open frames facing the dock, and an infinity pool between the living room and the water. It is not stylistic coincidence — it is a consequence of the site. When the front of the lot is the sea and the back is the forest, the design tends to resolve itself the same way.

Aesthetics and scarcity

Technical specifications

• Towers and units: not a tower. A horizontal condominium of waterfront lots, for custom construction, built on a peninsula in the bay of Angra dos Reis.
• Sizes: variable, since it involves individual construction on each lot. There is no unit type declared by the development; the residences already built exceed a thousand square metres.
• Parking: as per each house.
• Structural highlights: private boat moorings on the property itself, sized in the design for large vessels; frontages onto canal, marina, beach, sea and estuary; a licensed helipad; a private conservation area with trails; neighbouring a permanent conservation area on the western bank of the Bracuí estuary.
• Registry and parameters: condominium on the Rio de Janeiro state coast, outside the scope of the São Paulo survey’s urban planning parameters. Registry jurisdiction not confirmed by any source — the field is left blank.

Leisure and facilities

• Mooring for vessels on the property itself
• Licensed helipad
• Beach
• Private conservation area with contemplation trails
• Clube das Aroeiras, planned in the development’s project, with two tennis courts, a multi-sports court, a spa with sauna and pool, gym, kids’ area and games lounge

Location and surroundings

Points of interest · distances in metres

Access

• By land: the development’s own access gatehouse, within the Bracuhy complex.
• By sea: direct mooring at the property.
• By air: licensed helipad.

Angra dos Reis: the address

Angra dos Reisi is the heart of the Costa Verde, and Bracuhy is its most nautical tip. The mouth of the Bracuí river shelters a calm-water estuary, protected from the open bay, and it was this geography that attracted, back in the 1970s, the canal-based urban planning that defines the region today. From here one can reach both the Angra archipelago and the coves of Paratyi without facing rough seas. By land, the BR-101 — the former Rio–Santos highway — is the only route, and it is precisely this limitation that explains why the region’s top-tier addresses are organised around the marina and the helipad: access by water and by air is not ostentation, it is logistics. Reserva das Aroeiras neighbours Porto Marina Bracuhyi, with which it shares the complex and the marinas, and Marina Bracuhyi.