Studio Arthur Casas Updates A Modernist Home In Brazil

2024 Best of Year Winner for Large Residential Renovation

The modernist house on a rocky hillside overlooking Ilha Grande Bay had been designed in the 1980’s by Fernando Peixoto, a Brazilian architect whose buildings were known for bright, primary colors. A recent renovation by Studio Arthur Casas for a couple with two children enlarged the Angra dos Reis, Brazil, house on five split levels and took it in a more naturalistic direction, emphasizing the connection between inside and out. Expanding the building without enlarging the residence’s footprint required excavating below-grade for spaces like a screening room. The main social areas are on the upper floors, where removing interior walls created an open flow. In the living room, natural materials and neutral colors predominate. The ceiling was reinvented with diagonal beams and woven straw, and a large opening frames rainforest plants in an indoor garden. Elsewhere, skylights and folding latticework screens filter light while welcoming sea breezes.

PROJECT TEAM: ARTHUR CASAS; NARA TELLES; FABÍOLA ANDRADE; LIGIA DAMIN.

‘No Flags,’ a Furniture Exhibit in New York, Invites Introspection

This spring, Verso filled its New York showroom with an array of common objects—cabinets, a desk, a console—that were far from ordinary. Their wavy edges, undulating doors, and candy colors of high-gloss lacquered MDF had a funhouse vibe that belied a serious intent: to start a conversation about the cultural implications of design. The site-specific exhibition, “No Flags,” also the collection name, was the brainchild of Enrica Cavarzan and Marco Zavagno, founders of Venetian studio Zaven. “We conceived it as a landscape of flags in the wind,” Cavarzan recalls. Usually symbols of nationalist identity, flags are here subverted to represent openness and possibility. “Design can be a tool to generate a critical discourse around notions of nation, identity, culture, and authenticity,” she adds. Encompassing furniture, rugs, and ceramic vases, the series is a positive vision of a new world. Through Verso.

Pascali Semerdjian Arquitetos Employs Sustainable Wood Throughout This Spacious Home in Brazil

2022 Best of Year Winner for Large Apartment

This 4,000-square-foot residence for a Brazilian man, his American wife, and their two young daughters celebrates São Paulo’s inimitable urban style. Inside a nondescript 1990’s building, the gut renovation by Pascali Semerdjian Arquitetos centered on employing sustainability-certified indigenous wood throughout the four bedrooms and spacious public zones. It’s in the latter that a deeply Brazilian and vividly cosmopolitan aesthetic shines. In the kitchen, a 9-foot-long table of South American freijo wood cantilevers from a monolithic concrete island—a defiance of physics that recalls São Paulo’s iconic buildings. In the dining room, Bertjan Pot pendant fixtures hang from the exposed original ceiling, complemented by walls paneled in board-formed concrete. And a multitude of seating vignettes, including one anchored by an Oscar Niemeyer chaise longue, populates the living room, making it an extremely social space.

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This São Paulo Apartment by Architects Office and Triptyque Architecture is Elegant and Functional

For a 2-story apartment in São Paulo, Architects Office and Triptyque Architecture were responsible for a complete renovation to meet the needs of the client. The firms worked together to meld function and form—for example, a custom marble desk sits in the living area. They also included curtains, collapsible doors, and retractable partitions for privacy when needed. 

Throughout the space, iconic design mixes with luxe custom elements. Leather, stone, and brass comingle. “The project brought the great challenge of finding harmony between iconic pieces of Brazilian and worldwide design,” notes Architects Office’s Juliana Carvalho. Brazilian design and art take center stage, including pieces from Estúdio Rain and Jorge Zalszupin. International furnishings were also integrated, including by Patricia Urquiola and Michael Anastassiades. The designers also made use of the existing elements, including views of São Paulo. “The visuals of the city on all sides were prioritized in all environments,” Architects Office’s Raphaell Valença notes. 

This Sustainable Home by Pascali Semerdjian Architects Reflects São Paulo’s Style

The first time Brazilian architect Sarkis Semerdjian met clients Renato Lulia Jacob and Emily Perry, the chemistry between them was obvious. Semerdjian, who is coprincipal with Domingos Pascali of the São Paulo-based firm Pascali Semerdjian Architects, had gone to London in late 2019 to visit friends. Jacob and Perry, originally from Brazil and the U.S., respectively, had lived in England for a decade. When the couple learned of Semerdjian’s visit, they invited him for a meal at their Edwardian townhouse in North London. “Being there with them was like sitting at a bar with old friends,” Semerdjian recalls. From then on—despite the challenges of the project they were about to embark on—the relationship “just flowed.”

Not long before that dinner, around the time Perry became pregnant with her and Jacob’s second daughter, the couple had decided to move to São Paulo, where Jacob had grown up. “There was a kind of gravity pulling us back,” he says. They wanted their daughters to grow up speaking Portuguese and have more time with their Brazilian grandparents. “The window for both,” Perry adds, “was getting smaller.”

They hired Pascali Semerdjian, which had worked with several of Jacob’s friends, and began looking for a suitable apartment in Vila Nova Conceicao, a leafy neighborhood adjacent to São Paulo’s Ibarapuera Park, one of relatively few green spaces in a city famously choked in concrete and asphalt. They were looking for a place they “wouldn’t feel guilty over destroying and rebuilding,” as Jacob puts it, eventually settling on a spacious flat in a nondescript 1990’s building, previously owned by an elderly couple who had moved out five years earlier. Jacob and Perry returned to London, intending to visit São Paulo frequently during the gut renovation of the apartment—a plan the pandemic quickly nixed. “All our process was via Zoom,” Pascali reports, noting that the couple was only able to return to the city shortly before the project’s completion.

Having spent practically their entire adult lives as renters—in Buenos Aires, Lisbon, and London, where they’d moved three times in 10 years—the new homeowners “had a checklist of mistakes we wouldn’t make and things we liked,” Perry says. This included wall space for a growing art collection; public areas that were generous but not palatial; avoidance of leather or synthetic fabrics; and certificates of sustainability for every piece of wood used in the renovation. The goal: “A home that was proud of São Paulo,” a city, she adds ruefully, “that people love to hate.”

Gutting the 4,000-square-foot apartment was relatively easy. Removing the worn-out gypsum ceiling revealed the building’s elegant concrete formwork, which is left exposed in some rooms. Save for an unmovable plumbing pipe—wrapped in rope, it’s now part of the daughters’ playroom—there were few structural constraints, allowing the couple to organize the layout as they saw fit: The public areas and guest suite occupy the southern half of the apartment, while sliding doors allow private circulation between the three family bedrooms and the kitchen, an intimate sanctum within the larger context.

In particular, the clients worked with the architects to develop social zones that are both deeply Brazilian and vividly cosmopolitan. In the entry hall, a hemicycle of light blazes through a panel of jade-color Pakistani onyx, “like a sunset at the end of the corridor,” Semerdjian suggests. Board-formed concrete panels line the walls, from which a small, brass key bowl projects like a font of holy water: a secular blessing for the domestic space. The panels continue throughout the public areas, curving around the building’s idiosyncratic chamfered corners to create what Pascali describes as “a kind of tunnel” connecting the entry to the dining and living rooms. In the latter, the panels frame a pair of built-in sofas sitting in a large niche that formerly accommodated a fireplace—the type of fanciful gesture toward old-world glamour that Jacob and Perry were looking to avoid.

The residence comes to life in the refinement of its details, a punctilious approach to junctures and joints, to the points where materials meet. In one corner of the kitchen, shelves in washed freijo wood and pale gray quartz meet in a complex concatenation of boxes and panels, as precise as frames crafted for museums. Nearby, a 9-foot-long table, also fashioned from freijo, cantilevers weightlessly from the side of a monolithic concrete island—a cool, calm defiance of physics that recalls São Paulo’s most iconic buildings, which take heavy concrete masses and levitate them above the earth.

Another aspect of the sprawling inland metropolis—its constantly evolving relationship with a tropical environment that it has never fully suppressed—is reenacted on the apartment’s many planted terraces, which encircle it with an exuberant jungle worthy of neighboring Ibarapuera Park. “The garden is chaotic, like a forest,” Semerdjian acknowledges. “Our goal was to really surround the space. The foliage, the concrete—there’s a lot of identity in those elements.” The residence’s tranquility does not so much erase the stimulating excess of the urban environment outside as highlight its intoxicating beauty, the irresistible pull that brought Jacob and Perry and their young daughters here in the first place.

pascali semerdjian architects: ana luisa cunha

rodrigo oliveira paisagismo: landscape consultant

companhia de iluminação; dimlux: lighting consultants

avelart móveis: woodwork

dix arte metal: metalwork

tresuno: concrete work

steel engenharia e construções: general contractor

Moooi: pendant fixtures (dining room)

etel: table (dining room), chaise longue (living room), desk chair (main bedroom)

through studio schalling: chairs (dining room, living room), floor lamp (main bedroom)

villa remate: custom sofas (living room)

marset: sconce (entry)

pedras bellas artes: custom cocktail table, basalt flooring (living room)

espasso: bench

Sé: black side tables

vitra: lamp

phenicia concept: rug

lumini: sconces (playroom, child bedroom)

deca: fittings (main bathroom)

artek: stools (kitchen)

Nuura: pendant fixtures

docol: sink fittings

savoir beds: bed (main bedroom)

Bert Frank: table lamp

arte final placas: custom storage (child bedroom)

arteal artefatos de alumínio: windows

oscar ono: wood flooring

suvinil: paint

Architects Office Creates a São Paulo Apartment That is Both Warm and Minimal 

For an apartment in a leafy residential neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil, the client had lived in the apartment for years. Ready for a refresh that could also accommodate work-from-home needs, they approached Greg Bousquet’s Architects Office, an architecture and interiors firm with offices in Brazil and Portugal. Led by Raphaell Valença and Vinicius Fernandes, the firm’s intent was to adapt new demands and create an apartment that was both for living and for working. “The project managed to meet the demand for refuge and meeting at the same time,” Fernandes says. “It presents the possibilities of living with well-being in contemporary times,” Valença adds. 

In the home office, Architects Office designed a custom desk and shelving. In the living room, iconic pieces mix with furniture from emerging Brazilian designers. Linen curtains help create warmth throughout, alongside wood tables, artwork, and soft textiles. Throughout the space, Architects Office worked to mix pieces together in a way that was both minimal and cozy. Individual pieces are distinctive and have personality, but together they create a home that is a sanctuary.

Matheus Farah e Manoel Maia Arquitetura Earn a Best of Year Award for São Paulo Chocolate Shop

2021 Best of Year winner for Counter Service

Its nearly 200,000 Instagram followers is one indication that Dengo is a maker of world-changing chocolate, or, for those fluent in Portuguese, Chocolate com sabor de mudar o mundo, the Brazilian company’s slogan. Its cocoa comes from trees in sustainably managed agro forests, and the Bahia farmers from which the beans are acquired are fairly paid. Matheus Farah e Manoel Maia Arquitetura was equally conscientious in its design of Dengo’s first freestanding site, a 16,000-square-foot, four-story concept store that also happens to be the country’s tallest wooden building. And that wood is engineered CLT, which is prefabricated, thermally efficient, and easy to install, reducing project costs, duration, and waste.

Native peroba do campo composes the table bases, casegoods, and bar face in the Meu Dengo station, where customers can customize ingredients. Also noteworthy is the flooring. Called caquinhos, or little pieces, it consists of re-constituted shards of broken red ceramic. It was a popular style in 1940’s and ’50’s São Paulo homes but also nods to Dengo’s best-selling product: Quebra-Quebra, big bars of chocolate that can be broken into many pieces for sharing—sweet and affectionate, which just happens to be the Bahia translation of dengo.

Matheus Farah e Manoel Maia Arquitetura: Matheus Farah; Manoel Maia; Polímnia Garro; Andreia Oshiro; Fernanda Miguel; Rafhael Silva; Pedro Benatti; Matheus Aleixo; Alex Pataro; Henrique Costa; Isabella Rosa

Studio Arthur Casas Plays Off Light and Shadow in this São Paulo Showroom

2021 Best of Year winner for Showroom

Launched in 2020 to showcase sustainable furniture conceived and manufactured in Brazil, +55 Design needed a physical environment that would capture the essential Brazilian-ness of its wares. So who better to turn to for it than hometown architect and Interior Design Hall of Fame member Arthur Casas. His and his team’s solution resulted in a 7,750-square-foot, two-level showroom, its striking minimalism allowing the furniture to take center stage.

Controlling and modulating the strong tropical sun was a focus of the project. It’s also been a focus of Brazilian design for some time, giving rise to the cast-concrete facade screens known as cobogós. Casas’s version adds intriguing pattern—what he calls a “game of light and shadow”—to the otherwise neutral interior. It’s there that an amorphous opening connects the ground level and the mezzanine, adding a sculptural element. Encased in MDF paneling with a European oak finish, it’s topped by a retractable glass roof that floods the interior with natural light; from the mezzanine level, the opening serves to frame seating and tables by the likes of Roberta Banqueri, Studio MK27, and Casas himself grouped below. That level literally spills outdoors onto a terrace, which is surrounded by lush native plants, protected by a retractable awning, and furnished with more pieces by Casas.

Studio Arthur Casas: Arthur Casas; Regiane Khristian; Rafael Palombo; Alessandra Mattar; Luisa Mader; Fernanda Costa; Paulina Tabet