ORIGINALLY FROM RURAL Holland, Das grew Diesel from a company of 50 people to an international brand with 5,000 employees. “My specialty was always materials that have a life,” Das says. While selling jeans, that meant creating the illusion of history by distressing mass-produced denim. In his Trancoso projects — including his own home, Uxua and a four-cottage property built for the newscaster Anderson Cooper — he filled the rooms with objects marked by age: He furnished Cooper’s house with a coffee table made from a whale vertebra bought for $100 from a fisherman on the beach, a bed made from the giant wooden screws of an old cassava press and faucets and light fixtures made from copper piping purchased at a nearby hardware store — a detail, he says with pride, that now turns up in other designers’ projects all over town. Following this commission, Das introduced his own line of Uxua furniture, much of which makes use of local wood.

At Casa Cajueiro, Das decided to explore the Brazilian Modernist tradition that had been refined throughout the 20th century by both local designers and their counterparts from abroad, who, like him, had found their way to the country and decided to stay. What would Modernism look like, he wondered, if it had been invented in Trancoso? While the detached bedrooms, with their pitched roofs shingled in rust-red parajú wood, resemble the local fishing cottages, the core of the house, with its long swath of floor-to-ceiling windows under a flat concrete roof, reflects the classic midcentury homes of São Paulo. Inside, Das focused on crafts and techniques that reveal the human hand while referencing Modernism’s obsession with the machine age. In the kitchen, for instance, the designer covered one wall in pressed concrete tiles in 30 permutations of grays, blues and greens, their tonal variations the result of hand-mixing pigments. Throughout the home, ceramic pendants glazed in shades of lavender and sage mimic the tiered 20th-century designs of the Danish lighting manufacturer Louis Poulsen, with component pieces strung like beads on iron rods; Das imported the pigments from Nove, a town known for terra cotta, not far from Vicenza — “a really nice cross-contamination of cultures,” he says.