Ponta do Curral
Designing a destination around a way of life.
Ponta do Curral is a 275-hectare peninsula on the coast of Bahia, Brazil, set between ocean, river and protected Atlantic forest. Remote enough to feel like an island but connected to the mainland, the site presented an unusual opportunity: to create a residential destination without losing the landscape, culture and way of life that made the place worth coming to in the first place.
Roman Carel was part of the team that developed the early concept and strategic vision for Ponta do Curral. Rather than beginning with the real-estate product, the work began by asking what kind of life should exist there.
The answer was rooted in Bahia: informal, generous, connected to nature and built around community. That idea became the organising principle for the destination, shaping everything from architecture and landscape to hospitality, cultural programming and the spaces where people would naturally meet.
The plan imagined a limited number of residences integrated into the landscape alongside a village, restaurant and bar, guest accommodation, gardens, a nursery and spaces for art, craft, sport and gathering. Local materials, building traditions and native planting informed the physical language of the place, while ideas such as artist residencies, workshops, events, food production and communal spaces were introduced to give it a cultural and social life beyond the homes themselves.
The identity of Ponta do Curral was developed from the same foundations. Its visual language, storytelling and experience were conceived as expressions of the place rather than an overlay applied afterwards.
The result was a model for development in which property, hospitality, culture, landscape and community were considered as one system — with the ambition of creating not simply somewhere to own a house, but somewhere with its own rhythm, rituals and sense of belonging.