A São Paulo Home Welcomes Guests With an Invitingly Breezy Brutalism
The residence merges two Brazilian architectural styles with distinctly casual and formal spaces.
Jazz was playing upstairs—Ella Fitzgerald’s voice gliding down a twist of white steel steps toward the pastel terrazzo floor below. But the soundtrack could easily have been bossa nova.
The São Paulo house that architect Tito Ficarelli designed for his family includes a studio space for his wife, Luiza Gottschalk, an artist.
Photo by Joao Morgado
The house that Tito Ficarelli built for his family on a hill in the calm Alto de Pinheiros neighborhood, a tree-lined haven on the west side of sprawling São Paulo, merges two distinctly Brazilian architectural styles.
From the street, behind a low fence, the 4,000-square-foot home has a rough-and-ready facade of dark cinder blocks that riffs on the teeming city’s more ad hoc architecture.
Painted on the glass-enclosed terrace, one of her works adds a pop of color to the stark exterior, as does the garden below. "The garden is a mass of color, like a large outdoor painting," says Tito.
Photo by Joao Morgado
But once inside the front gate, in a garden full of purple flowers, you see that the blocks sit on top of a pedestal of sorts, a comparatively polished cast-in-place concrete structure that nods to São Paulo’s tradition of tropical brutalism.
Photo by Joao Morgado
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