In the Heights

At a residence overlooking the jungle in Trancoso, a fashion executive turned hotelier pays tribute to Brazilian Modernism.

- Michael Snyder

THE DUTCH DESIGNER Wilbert Das first visited the Brazilian beach town of Trancoso in 2004 on a whim after hearing about it from a friend in the Italian province of Vicenza, where he’d moved in 1988 at the age of 24 and eventually became the creative director of what was then a fledgling denim line called Diesel. Das’s friend had raved about Trancoso’s unassuming glamour, its 17th-century bone-white chapel that fronted the electric blue Atlantic and the fishermen’s houses in Easter-egg hues that line its grassy main square, the Quadrado. Das, now 55, went in June — “the lowest of the low season” — and left completely enchanted: “I’d never been any place like it.” A town of 11,000 people, Trancoso had neither electricity nor running water until the early 1980s, shortly after the first hippies, fleeing Brazil’s military regime, started migrating from São Paulo, 870 miles (approx. 1,400km) to the south. Even today, Trancoso seems not so much frozen in time as indifferent to it.