Working for Peace at Home, Too

EVERYONE deserves to come home to a calm and tranquil space, but no one more than Francisco Osler, a senior civil affairs officer at the United Nations. He has spent most of the last decade on peacekeeping missions, building schools in East Timor, mediating tribal conflict in southern Sudan and, currently, helping to strengthen government institutions in Haiti.

For nearly seven years, he has also been working on a project of his own: building his dream house here in Brazil’s capital, his hometown. “I wanted to have a base,” said Mr. Osler, 42. “I needed roots, a permanent address.”

Browsing the Web from East Timor, he came across a striking white cube of a house by Marcio Kogan, a Brazilian architect, whom he called and asked to meet on his next trip home. “What I liked was its simplicity,” he said. “Neutral but not monotonous. Clean but not aseptic.”

They first met in January 2003, soon after Mr. Osler bought a fifth of an acre in an undeveloped part of a wealthy Brasília neighborhood, for 200,000 Brazilian reais (in those days, about $57,000). Mr. Osler hired Mr. Kogan immediately, and by March they had agreed on a design — a 2,700-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bathroom structure made up of two glass-and-concrete boxes, one suspended over the other. Construction began in November of that year.