Discover A Brazilian Modular Home Nestled In Nature’s Embrace

For the first three years of his life, Brazilian architect Rodrigo Ohtake lived in a São Paulo apartment building designed by his father, Ruy, and named for his grandmother, Tomie, a renowned abstract artist who painted the tower’s white facade with oscillating bands of color. Completed in 1985, the building’s powerful concrete construction gestured to the Paulista brutalism that Ruy Ohtake had learned as a student at the University of São Paulo’s Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism—the same school where his son would study in the early 2000’s—while its curved balconies suggested the sumptuous forms and colors that defined his later work.

“I’ve been an architect since I was born,” says Rodrigo Ohtake, who merged his own small studio with his father’s firm in 2021, following Ruy’s death from cancer at age 83. “My family has been working in Brazilian culture for 60 years—we have a kind of a tradition,” he observes. “But we try to look to the future, not the past.”

That penchant for experimentation played a central role in the modular home that Ohtake built in 2023 for himself, his art-curator wife, and their three young children outside Ibiúna, a hill-country town southwest of São Paulo. Designed by Ohtake and manufactured by sysHaus, a producer of prefabricated homes, the 1,940-square-foot country residence comprises four 10-by-20-foot steel prisms, each with a different typology but all containing a bedroom. These are arranged like a pinwheel around a central void, which accommodates the open-plan living space. Sliding glass doors opening onto the surrounding forest and 33-foot-long steel beams (the maximum size sysHaus can use without support columns) define the edges of the communal volume at the building’s core. As in Brazil’s colonial terrace houses, Ohtake notes, “The void is where the house happens.”

To break with the orthogonal rigidity imposed by the prefabricated modules, Ohtake shielded the exposed corners of the bedroom units with freestanding, wavelike screens of blue perforated steel. This is almost an inversion of the house his father designed for his grandmother in 1968 and expanded through the decades as his aesthetic transformed. While the son uses curves to create privacy and blur his home’s strictly rational silhouette, the father leveraged the open floor plan enabled by the floating concrete-canopy roof—a typical feature of Paulista modernism—to insert rounded dividing walls painted in vivid primary colors.

The Ibiúna house is capped with an exuberant, amoebalike roof cut from orange steel. This shape, Ohtake acknowledges, was partly inspired by his favorite structure in São Paulo: Oscar Niemeyer’s Marquise do Ibirapuera, a covered pathway beneath a sinuous, white concrete-slab marquee that snakes between the trees in the city’s most important park, connecting buildings and offering shelter from the intense subtropical sun and rain. For insulation, Ohtake topped most of the roof with 6 inches of soil in a free-form planter bursting with grasses and hanging vines. A grassy ramp curls up one flank of the house to merge with the roof at the back. Embraced by the earth and practically erased from view, the home becomes a steel cave enlivened by the intrusions of the surrounding landscape. “When the wind blows, you almost feel the trees are inside the house—a lot of leaves come in, which I think is marvelous,” Ohtake enthuses. “I wanted to show that industrial materials can be in harmony with nature.”

The entire project served as a proof-of-concept for prefabrication in a country where, for the most part, Ohtake says, “We are still doing architecture as if we were building pyramids, brick by brick, when we should be building more like LEGO.” Despite pioneering architects like João Filgueiras Lima, better known as Lelé, who began developing ingenious modular construction systems in the 1960’s and continued innovating through the ’80’s, Ohtake believes most Brazilians still associate prefabrication with American-style cabinet construction introduced in the ’70’s. That flimsy, disposable approach held little appeal for families that regard their homes as patrimony for their children. “We can only prove that these houses are permanent by building them,” he asserts, something sysHaus will do when it starts shipping its first Ohtake-designed modular homes across the country later this year.

For Ohtake, modular-systems architecture is, above all, an extension of a generations-long inheritance of materializing a future that looks different from the past. That forward-looking attitude expresses itself in the Ibiúna house, of course, but even more powerfully in the way the family uses it. “I don’t have to worry about toys,” the architect reports. “The kids just go into nature to play with wood and leaves, stones and sand.” Educated to value rationality but raised to question its primacy, Ohtake worries over the future of a society that trains young people out of creativity in favor of more reliably profitable skills. “I’m trying to tell my children, ‘Use your sense of play, it will help you in your future,’ which is something I can say from experience,” he concludes. “The world is too serious. We should have more play.”

Inside This Modular Home In Brazil

OHTAKE: ANDREI DA SILVA; LEONARDO ROCHA; ISABELLA MARTINI; CARLA STELLA. SYSHAUS: GENERAL CONTRACTOR.

FROM FRONT AMÉRICA MÓVEIS: CLUB CHAIR (LIVING AREA), SOFA (TV AREA). ARTI MÓVEIS: ARM-CHAIR, COFFEE TABLES (LIVING AREA), SIDE TABLE (LIVING AREA, TV AREA). 31 MOBILIÁRIO: SLING CHAIR (LIVING AREA), CHAIR, STOOL (TV AREA). PUNTO E FILO: RUGS (LIVING AREA, TV AREA) TETO VINÍLICO: VINYL CEILING (BEDROOM). MEKAL: WORKSTATIONS (KITCHEN). THROUGHOUT JAPI: OUT-DOOR FURNITURE. TARKETT: VINYL FLOORING.

A Design Legacy Lives on in This Eco-Focused Park in Brazil

When the brothers Humberto and Fernando Campana opened their eponymous design studio Estúdio Campana in São Paulo in 1984, their witty, daring sensibility came as a shock to an architecture scene defined by one of the world’s most robust modernist traditions. Over the last four decades, they’ve invented a language all their own, making furniture with scrap wood and stuffed animals, cast bronze and bubble wrap.

In 2020, the brothers started work on a sprawling, 130-acre park in their rural hometown of Brotas, a 150-mile drive northwest of the city. Since his sibling’s untimely death in 2022 at age 61, Humberto, eight years Fernando’s senior, has thrown himself into that final shared project, slated to soft open in June as a place for conservation and study, but also, like all their work, of provocation and play. As Estúdio Campana looks toward its 40th anniversary, Humberto tells us more.

A Conversation With Estúdio Campana on Design, Conservation, and More

Interior Design: Could you start by talking about how Brotas shaped your work?

Humberto Campana: I was very blessed to have been born and raised there because it has such a beautiful landscape. But at the same time, it was extremely boring, so Fernando and I created our own universe. There was a movie theater that screened American westerns and films from Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini and we would recreate the scenery in our yard. We made an unconscious vocabulary that we would only discover years later.

We also avoided being contaminated by modernism. Brazilian architecture has such a strong connection to its modern tradition, but Brazil is much more than that. It’s crazy and colorful, full of texture and even kitsch, and we wanted to bring that into our work. We’re maximalists! We should be proud of all the elements of our cultural heritage.

ID: When you founded the studio, who were your peers and mentors?

HC: My icons were Roberto Burle Marx and Oscar Niemeyer, but especially Lina Bo Bardi. She was a modernist but also interested in the countryside, in our African and Indigenous heritage. She pointed us to Brazil. Fernando and I tried to be industrial designers in the beginning, which at the time meant thinking in terms of utility and mass production, but we failed! We always looked for freedom in our work because we know what it is to live under a dictatorship. Our first exhibition, in 1989, a few years after the dictatorship ended, was called Uncomfortable and it was filled with that anger over all the brutality our country had suffered. Because that’s the real Brazil, too.

ID: How did Parque Campana come into existence?

HC: My grandfather had used this property as a coffee plantation. Later, my father rented it out to cattle ranchers. From the time Fernando and I inherited it, we wanted to use it for conservation, but we were nomads, traveling all over the world, so we kept renting because we didn’t want it to sit there abandoned. When the pandemic came, it put us right back in the countryside and we started thinking: We’ve done workshops all over the world, why not in our hometown?

Growing up, it took almost eight hours to get to Sao Paulo on the unpaved roads, and we would see wolves and jaguars and other animals. Nowadays it’s a desert of sugarcane and soy beans. We wanted to seduce people—the families who work in the agri-businesses that are devastating the environment—with poetry, music, and film. We’ve planted over 16,000 trees, and the idea is to plant more, working with agronomists and environmental engineers.

Then we had the idea to create 12 architectural pavilions (there are six, so far) as spaces where people can have classes, meditate, and watch movies and concerts. There will be an educational program, too, both artistic and environmental, and it’s important for us that all the park’s furniture is produced in the countryside with local materials.

I want to create a school to preserve craft traditions with workshops for welding, weaving, painting, embroidery—all the things we used to have in Brotas when I was a child. Across the world, people are finally giving these crafts the respect they deserve. It’s the right moment to invest in the countryside. Life has been so generous to me and, living in a country with such deep social divisions, I feel it’s time to give back.

ID: What are your future plans for the park? For the practice?

HC: Right now in the park, all the poetry is there, but none of the logistics, so I’m working with a firm in São Paulo to complete all of that. In the studio, we’re working on a documentary that will launch at the Milan Triennale during the Salone and an exhibition at Friedman Benda in New York. I’m also working on a book about our way of thinking and making. But really, I’m focused on opening the park.

ID: Can you speak a bit about how the loss of your brother has affected your practice?

HC: Fernando and I had a wonderful relationship. There was so much trust and respect and intimacy. When I lost him, I felt completely naked, and thought it would be so difficult to keep creating. But I’m actually in a very creative moment right now. Creativity gave me a voice—I came from the countryside, I was supposed to be no one—and now it’s helping me to survive. The park is a memorial, an homage. All the energy I’m investing in it—it’s for him.

ESTÚDIO PLANTAR IDEIAS; LICURÍ PAISAGISMO: LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE. 

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 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

NC Design & Architecture Takes Home a Best of Year Award for This Residential Complex in Hong Kong

2021 Best of Year winner for International Lobby/Amenity

Hong Kong is about the last place you would expect to encounter a tree house. Yet there you’ll find a wood cabin with a simple gabled outline that a child might draw, suspended 12 feet above the street amidst tropical foliage. Conceived by NC Design & Architecture principal Nelson Chow, the cabin marks the entrance to a new 30-story residential complex by architecture firm AGC Design. It is also an invitation into a world of curiosity and childlike wonder where, Chow says, “I want people to feel that anything is possible.” Communal amenities span the second floor. A lounge, dining area, and kitchen occupy a terraced corner space overlooking the adjacent forested hillside—a shock of green that’s echoed in the finish on the kitchen cabinetry. Custom French trompe l’oeil wallpaper brings a librarylike calm to the lounge, which is furnished with its own suspended cabin similar to the one down on the street. A third of the floor is dedicated to a play area that includes more of the little structures. Floating above a ball pit, padded activity zone, and reading nook, they are connected by tubes, like a miniature cloud-borne city built for and governed by children.

NC Design & Architecture: Nelson Chow; John Liu; Rain Ho; Rafael Pardo; Jasmine Kong; Eddie Wong

NC Design & Architecture Goes Into the Woods to Envision a Residential Tower in Hong Kong

Forest huts and woodland lodges are the inspiration behind the interiors of Timber House, a residential tower in Hong Kong by NC Design & Architecture.

Hong Kong is among the last places on earth where you might expect to find a tree house. Yet there, in the middle of the Kowloon neighborhood, straddling the end of a congested, tower-lined alley, you’ll find just that: a wood cabin with a simple gabled outline that a child might draw, suspended 12 feet above street level amidst tropical foliage. Conceived by NC Design & Architecture, the abstracted cabin marks the entrance to Timber House, a new 30-story residential complex by property conglomerate New World Development and architecture firm AGC Design. It’s also an invitation into a world of curiosity and childlike wonder where, NCDA principal Nelson Chow says, “People should feel that anything is possible.”

Born in Hong Kong and raised between there and Toronto, Chow received a master’s in architecture from Ontario’s University of Waterloo before earning a certificate in men’s tailoring at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in 2005. He had always wanted to study fashion but the instability of a career in that industry made it a hard sell to his family. So he spent the first years of his professional life as an architect at AvroKO, a Manhattan firm specializing in hospitality projects. There he worked on designing everything from restaurant-staff uniforms to custom furniture, a holistic approach he took with him when he moved back to Hong Kong in 2009.

Chow founded his firm two years later, working on prominent restaurant and bar projects, including his breakthrough design for Foxglove, a slick speakeasy behind a 19th-century umbrella shop in downtown Hong Kong. “I like to think of my designs as stage sets that engage with emotional experience,” Chow says. “Architects like to look down on interior designers, and interior designers like to look down on people who work at a smaller scale than they do. But I think really everything, every detail, is equally important.”

That meticulous, experiential ethos made Chow the perfect designer to head up New World Development’s Timber House project. “I’m always looking for avant-garde ways to help strengthen the important relationship between society and our planet,” says CEO and executive vice chairman Adrian Cheng, the driving force behind the complex. “It’s very important to us that we make an impact with each property we produce, and I believe Timber House does this in a fun and creative new way.” Backing onto Ho Man Tin hill, a sliver of greenery that has made its eponymous neighborhood one of the city’s most sought-after residential districts, Timber House generates wonder and surprise precisely by restoring the connection between people and nature otherwise lost in the teeming metropolis. Comprising 240 apartments ranging in size from 222 to 526 square feet, the building is conceived principally for young families who move to the area for its top-notch schools.

The tree house, which floats in a three-story cutout at the building’s entrance, is just the first suggestion of the witty, mysterious, kid-friendly world inside. Powder-coated corrugated steel doors with brass handles and fluted glass panels are a portal between the sun-blasted concrete maze of the neighborhood and the lobby—a cool, forest lodge of a space, its walls painted deep olive—centered on a custom blackened-steel reception desk that resembles a woodburning stove, complete with smokestack. Each of the two elevators across the lobby has a backlit blackened-steel ladder running up its rear wall; reflected in the cab’s mirror ceiling, the rungs appear to offer infinite ascent toward an unseen destination. “We like to create a sense of whimsy wherever we can,” Chow says, “especially in this project, which is really for kids.”

Communal amenities span the second floor. A lounge, dining area, and kitchen occupy a terraced corner space overlooking the adjacent forested hillside—a shock of green that’s echoed in the pine lacquer finish on the custom kitchen cabinetry. A third of the floor is dedicated to a play area that includes a cluster of suspended cabins similar to the one down on the street. The little structures, which float above a ball pit, padded activity zone, and reading nook, are connected by tubes, like a miniature cloud-borne city built for and governed by children.

That singular combination of sophistication and play continues into the residential quarters on the higher floors. At the entrance to each unit, brass fixtures Chow calls “curiosity lights” use magnifying glasses to highlight apartment numbers. Inside, hand-picked finishes, from back painted–glass kitchen backsplashes to custom brass hardware, lend a sense of understated luxury, while a carefully chosen palette of pale grays, deep greens, and black is a far cry from the harsh, blank white of many residential-development interiors.

Black and gray ceramic tile clads the building’s facade, which is dotted with lushly planted balconies that provide privacy for city-facing apartments. The verdure extends to a rooftop garden-farm that commands impressive views of Hong Kong’s jagged skyline and gives clear outward expression to the developer’s commitment to sustainability. “Every city is addressing the idea of sustainability in its own way,” Chow notes, “so bringing greenery into a building, that’s not just happening in Hong Kong. But in a place this built-up, every inch counts.”

So, too, does every door handle, every surface, every point of connection between spaces and people—all the details that, taken together, make Chow’s work so engaging. Ultimately, Timber House suggests precisely what the designer hoped: If you can live in a cabin in the heart of Hong Kong, then maybe anything truly is possible.

NC Design & Architecture: john liu; rain ho; rafael pardo; jasmine kong; eddie wong

agc design: building architect

adrian l norman: land­scaping consultant

spectrum design & associates (asia): lighting consultant

hip seng builders: General Contractor

kettal: sofa, table, ottomans, cushions (terrace)

pierre frey: curtain fabric (play area, lounge)

koziel: wallpaper

Hay: chairs (dining area)

kvadrat: sofa fabric (lounge)

kohler co.: toilet, sink, sink fittings (bathroom)

ceramica vogue: tile

dulux: paint