Maybe I was under the ghostly spell of Irenio, the late neighborhood magician who burned sacred almescar tree resin to ward off evil while performing hypnotizing tricks. Out of nowhere, a sizable wild squawking yellow-and-blue macaw nicknamed Lara suddenly swooped down over my head. I already felt totally bewitched by my extraordinary ecocentric retreat: sinks were hand-carved from fallen tree trunks, TVs hid inside vintage suitcases, a stranded boat doubled as a beach bar, and weathered doors, windows and floors came from abandoned farmhouses.
In Brazil’s culture-loaded state of Bahia, the most entrancingly unique casas to book have got to be in the historic fishing village of Trancoso. Eye-popping candy-colored ancestral homes line the Quadrado, a five-acre pedestrian-only grassy rectangle dramatically anchored by a diminutive white 16th-century church erected from whale bones, coral and clay. Some houses — such as the cobalt blue cottage that Irenio once owned — are part of the sustainability-focused, superbly chic Uxua Casa Hotel & Spa, a place unlike anywhere else I’ve stayed.
Nearly everything in Uxua’s wide universe is either upcycled, recycled, restored, a relic, concocted in Uxua’s onsite experimental Vida Lab, gathered from its offsite 50-acre agroforestry farm Uxua Roca, sewn by Uxua seamstresses, or expertly crafted by Uxua artisans, including the local Indigenous Pataxo people. I initially slept within the hotel compound in a fanciful thatch-roofed treehouse outfitted with antique swings and what looked like Abraham Lincoln’s desk; then I moved four miles to rainforest-coastal sister property Uxua Mare, consisting of three expansive 100-year-old farmhouses relocated in the lush jungle from 450 miles away.
“I’ve always been attracted to things that have life. And I won’t throw anything out because you don’t know what you can use it for again,” said Wilbert Das, the Dutch-born down-to-earth Uxua co-owner and inventive curator. Before becoming a Trancoso hotelier and sought-after home builder, Das worked 21 years in Italy for the premium fashion brand Diesel as a highly successful designer and creative director. These days, he’s constantly clad in surf shorts and Brazilian Havaianas flip flops. And his own striking designs permeate Uxua, such as his minimalist three-legged chairs forged from salvaged brauninha wood (when you plop on this chair in your casa, just know it retails for $4,000 on the Uxua D.A.S. studio website).
Along the Quadrado, Das also constructed a one-of-a-kind tropical vacation hideaway for his good friend CNN newsman Anderson Cooper, who first explored Trancoso with “Real Housewives” buddy Andy Cohen in 2013. Nowadays, when Cooper isn’t visiting with his two young sons, the four-bungalow Casa Anderson is available for short-term rental through Uxua Alma’s roster of private residences. Das’ detailed, distinctive flair is abundant — in Casa Anderson’s main dining area, a used church confessional chair sits against a turquoise wall by old shadow box shrines containing saint figurines, a staple of Brazilian homes for centuries. The living room’s big screen TV is concealed by a worn Brazilian national flag emblazoned with the country’s motto, “Ordem e Progresso,” which translated from Portuguese means “Order and Progress.” Cooper’s smaller TV pops up from an authentic steamer trunk at the foot of his canopy bed.
An antique coffee press stood in one corner of the kitchen, a battered carpenter’s workbench with a vise functioned as a console table, and a lampshade was made from a discarded boat sail. The rustic vibe mixed with a modernist contemporary style; in 2016 Architectural Digest featured Casa Anderson as a cover story.
Uxua, pronounced oo-shoe-ahh and meaning “wonderful” in the Pataxo language, debuted in 2009 and currently offers 23 innovative dwellings and a hotel pool laid with 40,000 aqua-green aventurine quartz crystals to promote healing and positive juju. From the start, Uxua dove into helping the community — it built a school, funded capoeira classes to keep the traditional martial arts alive, supports a nonprofit that assists the disadvantaged, put students through college, and advocates for sustainable tourism and preserving Trancoso’s heritage. Das’ business partner and Uxua co-owner, Ohio-raised Bob Shevlin, is a longtime staunch activist for environmental and human rights.
One morning, after traveling through a sprawling emerald valley of roaming domesticated water buffalo, I arrived at a remote Indigenous village for a composting lesson put on by Association Despertar, an NGO closely allied with Uxua. Volunteer Raquel Machado patiently showed 12 of the 53-member Tonheira family community how to dig a composting pit and layer it with unwanted food scraps to produce fertilizer for their crops.
“Our biggest challenge here is garbage,” Despertar’s Jandira Cristina told me. “There are no municipal trash pick-ups so people throw their garbage in the backyard, which attracts flies and rats, or they burn it which is bad for the environment and their health.”
To deal with glass and plastic, the much-lauded Trancoso recycler Cali Ferreira already came to the rescue, regularly collecting those items from the community at no cost. Using industrial machines, Ferreira pulverizes glass that is shipped out to form cement blocks; his crushed, melted plastic particles — formerly broken lawn chairs, five-gallon water jugs, laundry soap containers, soda caps, etc. — become furniture in Ferreira’s Protect Paradise workshop.
I went with Das to the plastic recycling business, where Ferreira showed me some of his cool, speckled reinventions, including classroom desks fabricated for a local school and round side tables accented with checkerboard pattern tops. Ferreira is also molding Das’ new custom-designed chairs for Uxua out of plastic waste.
Boho background
Founded by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in 1586, Trancoso existed as an isolated fishing village without roads when hippies walked hours or days on empty Atlantic beaches to discover it in the 1970s.
“There was no electricity or running water until the early ’80s. People used to bathe in the river and light candles,” Das said.
Even in the early 2000s, Das remembers seeing just a handful of cars outnumbered by horses wandering on the Quadrado’s lawn. “I knew this place was for me when I came here 23 years ago and went into a bar and a horse walked in and no one batted an eye. It wanted to come in from the rain.”
On the Quadrado, guests can book a mint-green two-bedroom Uxua casa still called Gulab Mahal, just like when it was an Indian restaurant opened by hippies in the ‘70s. Next door is Uxua’s bright bubblegum pink Casa Seu Pedrinho, named after the festive local who once lived there, relished being a party guy, and enthusiastically participated in religious celebrations.
Traditions thrive. Behind the Quadrado’s Sao Joao Batista church, thousands of colorful ribbons wrapped around a lengthy fence perched on a seaside cliff. Every day, worshippers and tourists tie Bonfim ribbons — christened for a patron saint and a strong symbol of Bahia — with three knots each while making three secret wishes and asking for protection and luck.
Not far from Casa Anderson, a short path soon leads visitors through a thick mangrove forest to Uxua Praia, an alfresco beach club centered on a bar that is a decrepit marooned fishing boat. Uxua’s shoreline setup, which includes cushy couches, lounge chairs, and wood tables, almost endured last call when both Das and Shelvin were out of the country in December 2014. A corrupt public official used fake documentation to bulldoze the club with a city tractor in broad daylight because, Das says, an investor wanted to build a hotel or condos on the site. “Everybody was crying, the employees, the tourists. It was very violent. My bar kitchen glass was all broken up in the sand,” Das recalled. The boat itself survived.
It was on this sandy stretch where Gena Nascimento hawked shrimp on sticks and struggled to provide for his family. That was until Das gave him a steady job 17 years ago to adorn Uxua’s hotel with tropical plants and fresh blooms that Nascimento and his wife grew on a tiny plot. “Uxua gave me my first regular paycheck and security,” the father of five emotionally told me through an interpreter. Once impoverished, “Gena the Flower Man” sat beside one of his Golden Torch Heliconias in Uxua’s lobby and proudly disclosed he now owns a 55-acre flower farm.
At Uxua’s onsite workshop, local carpenter Robinho Soares had just taken a rotted border from a casa’s private pool and turned it into a gorgeous mosaic-like wood coffee table. Elsewhere, Uxua seamstresses sewed sofa covers and uniforms from material Das amasses. During a trip to Europe, Das brought back 50-year-old Italian linen to turn into bartender aprons.
You’d never know from Uxua’s low-slung hotel entrance — blending in with all the other Quadrado-facing homes — that when you step inside and stroll past a random 1960s powder blue Princess phone you’re in another land. I couldn’t see any of the other abodes from my Casa da Arvore treehouse, which I loved just for its indoor double showerheads that streamed water from eucalyptus tree logs. Surely, at the concealed 3,300-square-foot Casa do Lago, occupants savored their outdoor swimmable koi pond and indoor gold-leaf antique tiled wall.
My second accommodation was at the newer Uxua Mare, set on its own 15-acre Atlantic Rainforest preserve abutting a pristine deserted beach. Casa Azul, which I shared with a trespassing 4-inch dark-green lizard, had been painstakingly disassembled and trucked 450 miles in numbered pieces to this nature sanctuary. “It was like a jigsaw puzzle,” Das said. “It took me three months to put it together.” The spacious interior showcased Uxua ceramics and decor; my bedroom sofa was upholstered in what previously had been a military tent Das found in Belgium.
Heritage and health
Drums, tambourines, and twangy berimbau instruments reverberated as men and women mightily kicked at each other, spun around, ducked from potential strikes, did acrobatic maneuvers, and appeared to want to beat each other up during a continuous flowing motion. Inside a community center, I watched in awe as participants performed capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian game-like martial arts started centuries ago by enslaved Africans as self-defense against Portuguese colonists in Brazil. For more culture, another evening I attended the grassroots Teatro Trancoso and thoroughly enjoyed (even though I don’t speak Portuguese) a folkloric play about an ox and a troupe of goofy clowns.
As for wellness, well back at the hotel, Uxua’s Vida Lab resembled a sorcerer’s cabinet with rows of jarred beetroot powder, spirulina, pink peppercorns, herbs and what-not. Nutritionalists in this hut whip up stuff like passion fruit vinegar, wholesome protein bars, vegan cheese and hibiscus-tinged white chocolate. At breakfast, I drank ginger-based cleansing Vida “shots” from glass test tubes.
Most of the ingredients — such as the jabuticaba fruit fermented into Uxua’s homemade wine— derive from Uxua Roca, the 50-acre reforested organic farm that cultivates over 100 varieties of plants and trees for Uxua’s use. When I visited, farmer Sapatinho (“Little Shoe”) Oliveira cut open a hard-shelled cupuacu — Brazil’s official national fruit — for me to taste (kinda slimy and sour).
The next day, along the Quadrado, toddler girls tinkered with toy cars, vendors sold cacao candies and lemongrass ice cream, and children scored soccer goals in front of the landmark church. At one point, Lara the macaw dive-bombed over the soccer match, sending kids running and screaming. It was one of the parrot’s regular pranks; I wondered if magician Irenio smiled from the beyond.