Villas de Trancoso

Ranked the Best Pousada in Trancoso by Guia 4 Rodas.

• Five luxury one and two bedroom villas each with its own veranda, hammock and chairs.

• A property set on 7500 square meters of palm trees, landscaped and lighted gardens and 1500 square meters of beach front.

• Located in one of the best beaches of Trancoso

• A cabana, restaurant and white marble pool with sunken bar and an entertainment center with DVD movies, music and high speed internet connection.


• Breakfasts with hot steaming Brazilian coffee, seasonal tropical fruits and juices, baked breads, pastries, cheeses and omelets of your choosing.

• A restaurant featuring fine cuisines and drinks throughout the day and evening.


• An “on the beach” location featuring a terraced beach area with shaded palm trees, showers, beach bar, cabana, comfortable beach furnishings and cushions and… endless miles of golden sand beaches.

• A health and fitness area fashioned from Brazilian woods—on the sand and under the palms.


• A staff of 30 dedicated to ensuring our guests comfort and ensuring no need goes unmet.

• A private Trancoso vacation experience where one can relax, read, enjoy fine music and revel in the beauty that nature has bestowed on this special place.

For more information visit: http://www.mybrazilianbeach.com/

Uxua Trancoso


Uxua Casa Hotel, the newest place to stay in Trancoso, is off to an outstanding start.

This boutique hotel made up of nine houses - three of which are restored fishermen's homes - is surrounded by mature cocoa, coconut and jackfruit trees and gardens in a location facing Trancoso's grassy Quadrado, the historic central square that sums up the charms of the town's social life.

It took Uxua owner and designer Wilbert Das two years of work with local builders and artisans to create the hotel. Bahia and India inspirations meet harmoniously in the final result.

Six of the nine guest cottages at this brand-new boutique hotel—pronounced oo-SHOO-ahh—are scattered around a garden shaded by towering jackfruit trees; the three best rooms face the square. (Yes, one of those candy-colored façades can be yours.) Warm, rustic elements meet sleek Midcentury Brazilian furniture and fully outfitted kitchens. Take breakfast on your veranda or by the pool, flop into a hammock, and play out your biribando fantasy.

Website Description

Wilbert Das, Creative Director of Italian label Diesel, launches a fully independent project, the UXUA Casa Hotel (pronounced oo-SHOO-ahh) located in Trancoso, a colorful fishing village on Brazil's idyllic Bahian coast.

Situated on the historic 'Quadrado' – a grassy hilltop square closed to traffic except for the occasional horse – UXUA's unique 1 - 3 bedroom houses are self-catering or fully serviced according to preference. The units are complemented by a one-of-a-kind aventurine quartz swimming pool (aventurine an alluring green stone considered by many to possess powerful healing qualities), a restaurant, lounge, library, gym, spa, and a dedicated beachfront annex constructed of grounded fishing boats set beside ocean mangroves 5-minutes walk from the Quadrado.

Three of the UXUA houses are restored from traditional fishermen's homes and face directly onto the Quadrado, and the remaining six (including a multi-level treehouse made entirely of recycled wood) are nestled around pools in a lush tropical garden of flowers, fruits, and towering cocoa and jackfruit trees.

Wilbert conceived the entire UXUA project as a tribute to the region of Bahia and its dynamic people. Built with the collaboration of a group of talented local artisans and builders skilled in recycled materials and traditional construction methods, the project has taken two years to realize.

The resulting architectural mix showcases southern Bahian and Indian influences alongside a rustic modernism that nods to Wilbert's work in contemporary fashion and furniture design. The houses are each unique in every feature. Décor is composed of antiques and Bahian art as well as hand-made furniture and fixtures crafted on-site 

UXUA offers a spectacular immersion in a natural and traditional Bahian environment, delivered to guests enjoying an entirely new level of casual luxury from the comfort of 'their own home' in one of Brazil's most enchanting destinations.

UXUA endorses environmentally sustainable tourism, and contributes to projects for the maintenance and preservation of Trancoso's Quadrado and all its local beaches. UXUA is also a supporter of Trancoso's native businesses and community through a series of initiatives, including local partnerships and a commitment to progressive labor practices.

Uxua Contact Information:

Phone: 55-73-3668-2277
E-mail: reservas@uxua.com.br

Hugo Franca - Trancoso


An Old Friend of Ancient Wood
 
By JULIA CHAPLIN
Published: March 6, 2008

WANDER into the penthouse lounge of the new Huntley Hotel in Santa Monica, or the Tides Hotel in South Beach designed by Kelly Wearstler, or Philippe Starck’s recently opened Hotel Fasano in Rio de Janeiro, and you can’t help but notice the cocktail tables and other furniture made of chunks of rustic wood. Such eco-chic pieces seem to have edged out Buddhas, communal tables and taxidermy as the latest symbol of cool in boutique hotels, restaurants and luxury condos.
For Hugo França, a 54-year-old Brazilian furniture designer, the trend has been a long time in coming. Mr. França spent 15 years in the 1980s and 1990s in isolation in northeastern Brazil, learning the fine points of working with trees. Since that time, he has been sculpturing furniture out of fallen and burned pequi hardwood scavenged from the coastal rain forest.

“Hugo understands nature in a different way,” said Zesty Meyers, an owner of R 20th Century in TriBeCa, where a solo exhibit of Mr. França’s work opens on April 24. “Somehow he can look at wood and find natural contours and understand why it should be a chair or a bench.”

Mr. França’s self-imposed exile began in 1982, when he gave up his job at a computer company in São Paulo and moved to the jungle in Bahia, after becoming disenchanted with Brazil’s military dictatorship. (In the late 1970s, he says, he had protested against the dictatorship and was imprisoned and tortured by the government.) He returned to the city in the late 1990s and now lives in a high-rise penthouse with his fourth wife, Tania Soriani Barros, who works in television advertising.

Every 45 days, Mr. França makes the 1,000-mile journey to his studio in the Bahian fishing village of Trancoso, where he follows tips from local ranch hands, farmers and Indians who know where the tree trunks can be found.

The region is rife with charred six-foot-tall trunks of trees left over from the ’60s and ’70s, when the forests were slashed and burned for agriculture and cattle grazing. (The practice of deforestation has since been outlawed.) There are also trees that have died from drought or flood, but are still standing 150 feet high in the middle of dense, virgin jungle. These are Mr. França’s favorite finds, because he can carve an entire furniture series from one tree.

“Ranchers used to be happy to have me remove the trees,” Mr. França said during an interview in his São Paulo showroom in Portuguese through his translator. “They considered them trash. But now they see I’m successful, and they want more and more money.”

Recently, he said, he rode a mule to a farm where he bought a very old tree from a farmer for about $1,800 and then paid about $2,400 to haul it away.

In his pursuit of the right wood, Mr. França drives for miles in his red Fiat or by motorcycle over bumpy dirt roads. He and his two assistants camp out in sleeping bags with provisions of salted meats, waking before dawn and trekking hours through tangled vegetation with machetes and bug repellent.

In addition to falling branches, they must contend with the animals that love that moist, dead wood: bats, poisonous snakes and scorpions.

Mr. França doesn’t know how to draft or sketch, he said. He uses chalk to draw on the trees, assessing what they might become. He might look at a five-foot-wide stump and decide to invert it and scoop it out, creating a sofa with holes and pits. Other ideas emerge when the trunks are dug out of the ground.

“The most fascinating thing is when you start unearthing roots to see curves and shapes it reveals,” Mr. França said. He might take a seven-foot chunk of a root system and form it into a low curvy lounge chair with a center woven with strips of leather. Mr. França also buys abandoned canoes from the Pataxó Indians that he converts into elegant chairs, some big enough for at least two.

“Hugo’s work is so great because it’s archaeological,” said Fernando Campana, half of the Campana brothers furniture design team based in Brazil. Mr. França’s work is limited partly because there is only so much old-growth pequi — the primary wood he uses — still to be salvaged from the era of deforestation. “In 10 years the wood he uses won’t exist anymore,” Mr. Campana said.

When 15 pieces of Mr. França’s work appeared at Design Miami three years ago during the Art Basel fair in Miami Beach, they were immediately scooped up by collectors and dealers. The real estate developer Aby Rosen bought six rings made from a root system and stacked them on his lawn in St. Bart’s. “You can sit on them, but I consider them more of a sculpture,” he said.

Dominique Levy, an art dealer, bought a 10-foot-long bench last fall and placed it in her yard in the Hamptons. Bernardo Paz, the Brazilian mining magnate, bought several benches for his Inhotim Center for Contemporary Art outside the city of Belo Horizonte.

“Some of my work has ended up in St. Tropez, Dubai and Hawaii,” Mr. França said. “Will Smith has a trunk sofa at his home in Los Angeles.”

Mr. França’s work ranges in price from $18,000 for a small canoe chair to around $100,000 for a one-foot-thick, 20-foot-long dining table.

Mr. França’s ethereal shapes might seem to reference primitive Bahian-African culture, Brutalist architecture that celebrates size and materials, as well as the tropical curvaceousness of Oscar Niemeyer buildings, the landscape architecture of Roberto Burle Marx and the sounds of the bossa nova.

But he says his forms are those of a total outsider, cut off from art world references and living in nature with no electricity or plumbing. Until he left the jungle, Mr. França said, he had never heard of George Nakashima, a master of sculptural wood furniture.

Mr. França studied not art, but industrial engineering, graduating in 1979 from the university in his hometown, Porto Alegre, in the south of Brazil.

When he moved to Trancoso, it was just a remote village, although it is now a chic vacation spot. He lived with two roommates in a small house on the main square and at first survived by fishing and climbing trees for coconuts. “We bathed in the river,” he said.

Eventually, to support himself Mr. França opened a restaurant on the beach and worked as a contractor building houses. At the construction sites he began to carve furniture out of discarded wood. “It was then that I first started worrying about the waste,” he said. The reality of the forest devastation was striking, he said, when it occurred in front of your eyes.

On a January morning, Mr. França was sitting in his showroom flipping through a portfolio of his work when he came across a photo of a Jacuzzi carved from a charred tree stump, the first of eight that he eventually made after seeing a plastic one in a magazine. It weighs 20 tons and holds 11 people, and it was installed by crane on the grounds of a house in Iporanga, a town southwest of São Paulo.

Mr. França lamented that he will probably never happen upon another tree trunk so accommodating. “It’s hard when you’re working with a finite resource,” said Mr. França, who is investigating other types of discarded hardwoods.

A fresh spin, indeed, on the concept of limited editions.


Trancoso at The Guardian

Looking for the party?
Been to Ibiza ... done Goa? There's always a new season starting somewhere

Stephen Armstrong
The Guardian, Saturday 16 December 2006

Trancoso, Brazil

The scene: It was once nicknamed Hippyville for its laid-back population. A spectacular millennium party brought in the São Paulo elite, now enchanted by its remoteness, laissez-faire attitude and Unesco-protected architecture. Sunday night is the big night with long dinners, live music in the square and late-night beach parties.

Where to drink: Trancoso Bahia Bonita Beach Inn, Beach do Rio Verde (00 55 3668 1565, bahiabonita.com.br) best enjoyed by candlelight.

Best time to go: Christmas-February - especially New Year's Eve. Journey Latin America (journeylatinamerica.co.uk, 020-8622 8491) offers seven nights in a suite at the boutique Etnia Pousada hotel in Trancoso from £893pp, including return flights from Rio.

Trancoso at Food and Wine Magazine

A Four-Star Chef in a Movie Star's Brazil



The remote Brazilian beach town of Trancoso may be the world's sexiest and most exclusive vacation spot (just ask Gisele Bündchen and Matt Dillon). Eric Ripert trades his chef's whites for a sarong to learn about the lusty local cuisine.

    By Manny Howard

Look, dendê oil," says Eric Ripert, grabbing what looks like a soda bottle refilled with spent transmission fluid. "Every teaspoon of the dendê is one day off your life." When warmed, the diabolically rich cooking oil so beloved in the Brazilian state of Bahia gives off a nutty aroma that permeates everything—our clothes (the little we have on), our hair, even the patio outside this pristine kitchen. "As long as the dendê takes time off the bad end of your life, you should be okay, no?" he asks.

Ripert, chef and co-owner of Manhattan's famed Le Bernardin, has chucked his chef's whites for a midnight-blue sarong and an Egyptian-cotton shirt unbuttoned to his belly—his Brazil uniform. This trip to the secluded Bahian beach town of Trancoso is the latest installment in Ripert's career-long effort at continuing education. And because Trancoso is a new favorite of the international A-list (Gisele Bündchen, Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Campbell), the merriment quotient promises to be higher than usual.

Brazilian cuisine tends to meld the foods of the country's early Indian, Portuguese and African populations with those of its more recent European and Japanese immigrants. That's not quite the case in Bahia, where the original influences have been jealously guarded.

"The food we eat this week is centuries old," says Paulo Oliveira, Ripert's travel companion and the owner of the Brazilian restaurant Circus in New York City.

"I love the Bahian simplicity, its continuity. Right now I don't know how food this rustic will find its way onto the table at Le Bernardin," admits Ripert, "but that is why we are here. We learn the recipe. We learn a technique or two, maybe. So I am sure we will find a way. These dishes are too honest to ignore, no?"

Trancoso is not an easy place to get to, requiring a short flight from São Paulo, followed by a bus, jeep or boat ride. Portuguese explorers briefly dropped anchor nearby in 1500, and missionaries built one of Brazil's first churches in Trancoso in 1656, but the town was essentially forgotten by the outside world until a handful of Brazilian hippies, or biribandos, decided to settle here in the 1970s, eager to evade the repressive culture of the ruling junta. There were no roads, no electricity—heck, no currency—but with the help of the few Pataxó Indians and mixed-race residents who were living in the area, the biribandos successfully lived off the grid.

Then, about three years ago, Brazil built the first highway to the region. Trend-conscious Brazilians arrived, followed closely by international celebrities, yet the locals remain refreshingly oblivious to Hollywood blockbusters or platinum-selling albums.

Oliveira is a friend of Elba Ramalho, the Brazilian pop star, who has an impressive compound in Trancoso. Since she is in Rio recording her umpteenth album, she's given Oliveira and Ripert the run of her house, Casa da Elba, and its gigantic kitchen.

On our first afternoon, Maria Auxiliadora Etheve, known as Dora, the owner of the local restaurant Cacau, arrives to cook with us. Ripert tells her he wants to learn the staples of a Brazilian kitchen, with a focus on Bahian specialties. Etheve claps her bejeweled hands on her white Capri pants. "Feijoada and moqueca de camarão," she replies so matter-of-factly that there is little to say.

Feijoada, Brazil's national dish, is a stew loaded with black beans and meats of every description: smoked pork loin, bacon and sausage such as chorizo. Working with the determination of a surgical crew, Etheve and her staff show Ripert how to make the base: They sweat garlic and onion in oil in a cast-iron pot, then add the black beans and water and cook until the beans are almost tender. Then they add all the meats and a whole hot chile to the pot and simmer the mixture some more. Once it's finished, the stew will be so murky it's almost pitch-black. A first-time feijoada eater will rarely fathom the dish's earthy joys until the first taste.

Moqueca de camarão has its origins in Bahia. Its name, which translates to "shrimp stew," belies its complex flavors. After Etheve, Ripert and the staff shell and devein a pile of shrimp (keeping the heads on), Etheve sautés onion, garlic, bell peppers and tomatoes. The next step is to add the fish, coconut milk and cilantro, and serve it with white rice. Ripert tastes the broth and smiles, then starts thinking out loud about ways he can play around with the recipe, perhaps by adding grouper or varying the herbs or aromatic vegetables.

When the lesson is over, Ripert, Oliveira and I stroll to the quadrado, a historic green in the center of town. Horses graze on the grass, and teenagers play a raucous soccer match. "Come, I want to show you my favorite bar," Oliveira says.

The bar, Laricaria, is on Rua do Beco—Alley Street. The first of many things to recommend the bar is the bench outside, covered in faded fuchsia satin. The rapid delivery of an unsolicited can of Bohemia beer has me instantly hooked on this place. We recline on what is essentially a 30-foot-long outdoor banquette, with a view into the windows of the beauty parlor across the way. Oliveira explains that he and Ripert used to spend hours on these benches waiting for the "peacocks" to emerge from the salon.

Dinner that night at Cacau is a feat we will no doubt never recover from:bolinhos de arroz, classic Brazilian rice balls dipped in egg and bread crumbs and fried; coxinhas, fried pastries filled with chopped chicken, garlic, onion and olives and shaped like chicken legs; and peixe ensopado, a fiery Bahian fish stew. Each dish is accompanied by another cry for cold beer or, worse, another round of caipirinhas.

The next day, Oliveira manages to wake up at dawn to get some chickens for a party that afternoon. Ripert's first idea is to stuff them with chorizo, chiles and herbs and roast them, then serve them with hand-cut yuca fries. "Poules et frites!" he says excitedly. "Is there anything more French? And yuca will make it Brazilian, no?"

Oliveira diplomatically reminds Ripert that unlike the chickens he cooks at Le Bernardin, these birds had lived a life akin to that of the surf bums scattered along the coast of Brazil, and that this life would not translate well in the dry heat of a roasting pan. "Ah, of course. How stupid of me!" Ripert replies. "We will have to think of something else to do."

"Frango com quiabo!" shouts Oliveira after a pause. "It is a fricassee with okra, garlic and onions. It is a dish typical of Minas Gerais"—his home state.

"But we must add something to it. We need lemongrass and ginger. Do we have lemongrass in the garden?" asks Ripert.

"I am sure of it," his friend replies, looking quizzically at the posse of assistant chefs. "Please get the best lemongrass in the garden. And can you find some ginger?" The request for ginger is greeted with blank stares. The fever that emanates from Ripert has consumed Oliveira and, standing there in his fuchsia sarong, flip-flops and T-shirt, he momentarily forgets his otherwise courtly manners. " I don't care where you find it, we need it. And it must be the best."

Quickly returning with fistfuls of lemongrass and ginger, the crew helps Ripert make the fricassee. They season the chicken with salt, pepper and oregano, then brown it in oil. Then they make a broth out of onion, garlic and ginger, stirring in flour to thicken it and then adding chicken broth, coconut milk and pieces of lightly smashed lemongrass. After adding the chicken back in, they simmer the mixture over low heat. In a separate pot, they boil okra in salted water until it's bright green, then add it to the chicken stew.

Outside the kitchen, there's a hum of voices—the guests are arriving.

Lunch, served on a 24-foot-long ebony table, is a giddy affair. "It will take some work to translate this meal into something I could use at Le Bernardin," Ripert says, sucking on a chicken bone. "But I will do it. If for no other reason than that I must remind myself of the feeling at this table right now."

The completion of my third sakerinha (a caipirinha made with sake) seems the perfect moment to retreat to the beach for a swim. Moments after I'm beyond the breakers, Ripert's grinning face pops out of the calm azure water. Bouncing gently on the waves, we watch a parade of scantily clad young Brazilians peer through the gate of Casa da Elba. "Elba really is this country's Madonna—just a few years older. Still, you know, she recently published a photo book of herself and she is naked in many of the pictures. Not bad, considering. That is Brazil. Can you believe it?"

Vanishing from my side as quickly as he'd arrived, Ripert bounds up the warm, golden sand and back into Casa da Elba. I let a few swells pass over me, then follow him up the beach—only to discover that the gate is now locked. I bang on it and call out. No reply. I take matters into my own hands and drag a cocktail table to the gate to use as a stepladder. Flip-flops and a wet sarong have never been the chosen uniform of a cat burglar. In no time I am stuck on the fence. A fresh group of tourists appears and starts yelling, "Is this Casa da Elba?"

"Yes, it is."

"Can we visit with you?"

"No," I respond with all the authority a half-naked burglar can muster.

"We will be no trouble."

"I'm sure. But I'm sorry, no," I say and roll over the fence, collapsing in a pile on the lawn. Rewrapping my sarong and limping slightly, I make my way up the manicured path and over the bridge that spans the mangrove swamp, toward the kitchen just beyond.

Manny Howard is working on a documentary about Afghanistan. Less dangerously, he cruised to Alaska for F&W last year.

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