Andrada Family Estate

Andrada Family Estate is both Diego’s home and the expansive setting for Bea’s treehouse project. Its hundreds of hectares of gardens offer a dreamlike landscape of varied trees, fountains, and wooden benches, while the main house remains difficult for Bea to enter. The contrast between these spaces gives the estate its particular charge: it is at once a place of professional work, a family home governed by boundaries, and the secluded setting of Bea and Diego’s secret intimacy.

Property and ownership

When Diego brings Bea and Ingrid through the grounds, the estate initially appears to belong to the established family whose name it bears. Bea assumes that its house and sawmill have always belonged to the Andrada family, and that Diego acquired them by marrying Diana. Diego later corrects her: he says the house, sawmill, and factory are his, explaining that when he married Diana, her family was bankrupt and close to losing everything. He took responsibility for the debts. The disclosure complicates the appearance of inherited privilege. The estate’s family name and longstanding associations do not tell the whole story of who owns it or how that ownership came about; Diego’s account places financial rescue, rather than a marriage that brought him wealth, at the center of his claim.

The estate’s buildings and business holdings also make it more than a picturesque residence. The house, sawmill, and factory form part of Diego’s material responsibilities, and the treehouse commission takes place within that working property. Its grounds may appear separate from business, but the setting joins domestic life, industrial assets, and construction in one extensive estate.

The garden and the treehouse site

The garden stretches across hundreds of hectares and contains firs, pines, walnut trees, almond trees, chestnuts, and oaks, among other varieties. Bea sees giant trees alongside smaller ones, with fountains and wooden benches set among the lush growth. She had imagined walking there and losing herself in the vegetation, but arriving with Ingrid to discuss paid work changes the experience: she does not want to be on the estate and makes no effort to conceal her reluctance.

Diego leads them to a centuries-old oak. His daughter likes that tree, and he believes it could also serve the project; Bea asks to photograph it. The choice makes a particular tree within the immense garden the focus of the commission. What had been a landscape Bea once pictured as a place of wandering becomes a practical design site, selected around the daughter’s preference and Diego’s judgment of its suitability.

Construction and working life

Once construction begins, Bea returns to the estate early each day to direct the team. Her previous work had centered on drawing and planning; leading builders, foremen, and plumbers is new to her. Ingrid delegates the responsibility, and Bea discovers that she can manage the work. The shift gives the grounds a second function: beyond their role as scenery and private property, they become a job site where Bea tests her ability to take charge.

That responsibility brings uncertainty as well as opportunity. Bea worries that she may not be equal to the task, while Ingrid’s working style combines demanding standards with substantial freedom for the person she trusts with a job. Diego appears at the construction site only occasionally, sometimes during the day and sometimes near its end, to supervise. He and Bea keep their conversations to what the project requires. The limited exchange maintains a professional surface even as the construction site places them in close, continuing proximity.

Diego also has a temporary toilet installed in the garden so the crew will not need to enter the house and disturb his mother-in-law. This practical provision marks a boundary between the work outside and the household within. The construction can proceed across the grounds, but workers are not thereby given access to the domestic interior.

The house and its boundaries

Bea is curious about the inside of the main house, wondering whether it contains many portraits of Diana or whether its atmosphere has become less oppressive since her death. These are Bea’s questions and imaginings, not established descriptions of the rooms. Her curiosity is sharpened by the fact that she cannot simply wander in: she makes a couple of attempts under various pretexts, while the household includes a woman caring for Diego’s mother-in-law. The narrative leaves the interior largely out of view, making the estate’s most public, expansive feature—the garden—more accessible to Bea than the private house at its center.

That separation becomes especially clear at night. While Bea is in the treehouse without her clothes, the estate’s automatic gate opens and a car arrives. Diego’s father-in-law gets out, unfolds a wheelchair, and helps his wife into it. Bea hopes they will go straight into the house without noticing her, but the woman points toward the treehouse. Its kerosene lamp is lit, making the structure conspicuous in the dark; Bea rushes to put it out. The scene turns the garden’s seclusion into a fragile, conditional privacy: the treehouse is hidden among the grounds, yet a single visible light can draw the household’s attention to it.

Narrative significance

The estate repeatedly juxtaposes openness with restriction. Bea can walk through a vast garden and direct a construction crew there, but the house remains a space she is curious about and cannot freely enter. Diego’s explanation of the property’s debts likewise unsettles the assumptions encouraged by its family name: the estate appears inherited, while he describes having taken on its liabilities. The grounds thus carry both material history and present-day tension.

The treehouse intensifies that tension. It begins as a commission for Diego’s daughter, anchored to a tree she likes, and becomes a private place used by Bea and Diego. Its position within the estate permits secrecy but cannot guarantee it. The unexpected arrival of Diego’s in-laws and the lamp that betrays Bea’s presence make the landscaped grounds part of the story’s intimate and domestic conflicts, not merely a beautiful backdrop.