A quick detour into Brazilian botany, with apologies to the architecture fans. Brazil has more than 46,900 native species of plants, algae and fungi, with more than two-fifths found nowhere else on Earth. Across the Amazon rainforest, cerrado savanna, Atlantic Forest, Pantanal wetland, Caatinga scrub and Pampa grassland, the country’s plant life seems less like one national inheritance than several botanical worlds sharing a border. Roughly 10% of the world’s flora occurs in Brazil, and the country has more registered plant species than any other.

Pore through those thousands of species and, more than 50 times, one name appears in Latinized form: burle-marxii.

That would be Roberto Burle Marx. Despite having his name attached to a small botanical dynasty, he was not a formally trained botanist. He was, more consequentially for Brazilian design, a landscape architect with the instincts of a painter, plant collector and conservationist.

“In Brazil, we have Pelé in football, Niemeyer in architecture and Burle Marx in landscape,” says Fred Judice Araujo of boutique brokerage Judice & Araujo, who along with Patricia Judice is representing a $22.79 million Rio de Janeiro home shaped by one of Burle Marx’s last landscape designs.

Raised in Rio de Janeiro, Burle Marx understood the country’s abundance as both subject and material. The landscape trained his eye and shaped his values, first as an artist and then as a designer who would come to see plants as living form and structure. Yet, as often happens, it took distance for him to see home clearly.

“In Brazil, we have Pelé in football, Niemeyer in architecture and Burle Marx in landscape.”

While studying painting in Berlin, Burle Marx developed the visual discipline that would later give his gardens their force of mass, color, composition. Those lessons would surface in bold planes of planting, organic forms and curves that moved across the land with the authority of brushstrokes. But the decisive revelation came at the Dahlem Botanical Garden, where he encountered Brazilian species far from Brazil and saw them with new astonishment, almost as emissaries from home.

[possible second image of RBM]

That encounter helped awaken his lifelong devotion to plants. Upon returning to Brazil, Burle Marx began collecting tropical and subtropical species with rare intensity, eventually transforming his home outside Rio into a living archive of Brazilian flora, more than 3,500 plants strong.

Naturally, those twin devotions led him toward landscape architecture, where he became one of the 20th century’s most revered figures.

Before Burle Marx, elite Brazilian gardens often looked toward Europe for models of order, symmetry and imported refinement. Burle Marx looked around him. Native plants, long dismissed as wild or ordinary, became the basis for a new, modern, avant-garde language. Not translation, but composition.

He carried that conviction to the end of his career, and it is written into the grounds of his design at the recently listed Rio residence.

Set in the hills of Joá, the west Rio neighborhood where the city rises into Atlantic forest and mountains, the roughly 6,000-square-meter (just shy of 65,000 square feet) property occupies terrain well suited to Burle Marx’s imagination. Here, high rock, ocean air and the urban sweep of Barra da Tijuca below create a setting that feels at once theatrical, lush and unmistakably Brazilian.

Native palms and trees are drawn to the property’s edge, forming a living barrier that encloses without isolating. Against the home’s cleaner architectural lines, Burle Marx’s individual plantings read as painterly gestures, flashes of form and texture that give the grounds their modernist rhythm.

Most striking of all is the flat plane of the grounds. In Joá, where the land gathers around the great presence of Pedra da Gávea—the mountain whose unmistakable form looms over Rio— before folding toward forest and sea, a level expanse of this scale feels equal parts modernist and surrealist. Here is a parcel flat enough for a football pitch and oversized swimming pool, held against the neighborhood’s wild geology.

“After more than 20 years working in luxury real estate, it takes a lot for a property to make you say ‘wow,’” Judice Araujo says. “This one did. In Rio, it is incredibly rare to find land that is flat, private and surrounded by nature, with views like this.”

The residence itself is, in its own way, an extension of those Burle Marx principles. Built in 1980 and completely renovated in 2022, the contemporary glass-and-steel structure is a study in bold planes, mass and bold materials.

Its interior spaces feel suspended between stone, timber and foliage, with floor-to-ceiling glass pulling the garden into almost every room. The materials remain elemental: board-formed concrete overhead, rough stone walls, wood floors and bronze-dark framing. The home also carries an environmental logic that feels true to Burle Marx’s legacy, with 100% solar energy generation and an integrated water recycling system.

The result is a home that feels like a natural conclusion to the Brazilian modernist ideal, with flora, geology and architecture held in a single composition. The point is not to restrain the natural world, but to compose it. Burle Marx understood that Brazil’s botanical richness was not excess to be tamed, but a palette to be mastered. The art was in selection, proportion and rhythm. With so many colors available, the genius was knowing which ones belonged.

Judice & Araujo is a member of Forbes Global Properties, the invitation-only network of top-tier brokerages worldwide and the exclusive real estate partner of Forbes.