GURUMÊ SÃO CONRADO

This is the project for the restaurant Gurumê, which specializes on Japanese cuisine. The name is a witty play of the word ‘gourmet’ and aims to emit a feeling of simplicity and sophistication, concept which the office sought to carry through to the design.

The joining of two continuous rooms produced three space with distinct atmospheres: the main hall, the private spaces and the traditional sushi bar. The largest of these contains a collective table with a winding shape that stimulates people’s interaction. The ‘private’ space is formed by a tunnel structured by a succession of geometrically defined porticoes cladded with thin slabs of cumaru timber. Towards the back one finds the sushi bar, comprising of Corian table tops where the client is invited to watch the dishes being prepared.

The materiality of the project, a combination of oxidized copper and timber, was a choice seeking to evoke feelings reminiscent to fishing world: its culture, its boats and its ships. Meanwhile, the hydraulic tiles found on the floors are all hand-crafted and neutral to guarantee the focus rests on the colors of the wood and oxidized copper.

DELTA HOUSE

Commissioned by a couple with three young children, this weekend house, located one and a half hours away from São Paulo, is built on a sloped terrain surrounded by an important Atlantic Forest reserve, in a plot allowed for building purposes. The functional program was laid out in different levels so as to let the house adapt to the existing terrain and trees in a subtle fashion. 

The entrance is made from the car park on the lower level, from which a wide staircase shoots up across the first floor and on to the terrace where the social areas and master suite are built under a light canopy. 

The first floor houses the children’s suites and overhangs the stone base of the house, providing shelter to the car park and arriving guests. The sunscreen panels that clad this volume give privacy to the bedrooms and provide lightness and transparency to the building. 

The upper floor is the most privileged part of the house, benefiting from outstanding views of the sea and beach that are less than one hundred meters away. The trapezoidal, wafer-thin, canopy sits on large glass panes and forms a pavilion that shares the same floor as the large veranda around it. The interior and exterior grades are one and the same. 

The subtle canopy’s slope and the orientation of the timber sunscreens guide the eye towards the horizon, where an infinity edge makes the swimming pool part of the ocean. 

JOA CHAPEL

A client commissioned our office to design a small chapel for small family ceremonies within his residential gardens. The deeply sloped site is in Rio de Janeiro’s neighborhood of Joá and is surrounded by dense rain forest. The building was chosen to stand in a secluded place where tropical vegetation, sky and ocean views provided a beautiful backdrop to the sacred space. As requested, construction was concluded within three months after the initial draft. No trees were felled, and the earth was left practicallyuntouched.

A search for simplicity was the drive behind the design, born of the desire to allow a visitor to access a formerly unreachable point in space. At tree canopy level, the feeling of proximity to nature is enhanced. The building is framed by a sequence of timber structural elements that sit on a narrowing triangular platformprojecting towards the sea. The wooden floor is supported by a single column opposite to the entrance, rising from the ground deep below and transforming itself, at eye level, into a cross. From the inside, one can also look sideways and contemplate the surrounding vegetation showing between the vertically arranged wooden beams. The exterior glass panes shelter the interior from sunlight, wind, and rain and gently mirror the tree tops from the outside. Rational building solutions allowed quick assembly andminimal site impact.

The Joá Chapel is a building designed with technical pragmatismto create a spiritually charged place. By reducing the architectural components to the bare essential, its structural elements acquire symbolic and poetic functions.

DOIS IRMÃOS APT

This penthouse in front of Ipanema beach is in a special situation, in a corner clear, without apparent neighbors, like she’s designed the front of the other buildings, overlooking the sea with a 360 degree view to the Arpoador rock, Morro Dois Irmãos and Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas. The client, a father with a pre-teen son, let us open all the apartment areas at the most, turning into a huge veranda, including interior and exterior.

The apartment is like a glass box. The landscape invades the living room/veranda and is even more prized by the materials used, the floor only in rough granite sand tone, the tissues in neutral tones and blues and the works of art that were chosen intentionally to each space. Joinery panels hide all doors and make a soft transition from the social to the intimate and service areas. The 4 released decks that glide over the swimming pool line may form different environments, transforming and extending the living room and the family room when desired.

The veranda fully integrated to the inner part can be closed through metallic blinds and retractable awning protecting the afternoon sun and allow full permeability and protection. The vertical garden accompanies the pool and joins the intimate and social area forming a tropical green corridor. The intimate part is more protected and stays inside the block, accommodating the father and son suites, kitchen and dependencies.

JARDINS APT

The Jardins Apartment, located in the neighborhood of the same name, and with 750 square meters, was developed very closely to clients – art collectors –, especially to accommodate the personal collection, but with the cosmopolitan tone of São Paulo city and going against the grain of the aseptic spaces of an art gallery.

To accommodate the artworks with a certain intimacy and sobriety, the project received demolition wood floors in black cinnamon wood and walls in modular panels covered in off white linen, which sometimes mimics the access doors to the different spaces, and sometimes the audio systems and automation devices. The fabric was chosen after extensive research by the interiors team so that the weft would not compromise the quality of acoustic propagation.

Surpassing the entrance hall, an installation art by the Brazilian sculptor Tunga, attached to the ceiling, welcomes residents and visitors, with an adjacent void, allowing it to be appreciated by the spectator without visual interference. On the side panel of the entrance door, a painting by Basquiat. In the background, a large sculpture by the visual artist Henrique Oliveira leads to the living room.

In the living room, integrated with the other living spaces, 12 panels by Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão stand out above the sofa. The furniture was chosen together with the clients, with a curatorship of Danish design pieces from the 1930s and 1960s in antique shops in New York. In harmony, other contemporary ones, such as the raw wood coffee table by Brazilian designer Hugo França, and pieces designed by the Bernardes Arquitetura team. Color appears in tapestry and artwork, protagonists of the space.

Home theater and office are also integrated into the living space, and the dining room receives two tables specially designed by Bernardes, whose support structures contain small libraries, and can be joined together. In the office, the highlight is the reflective sculpture by the Indo-British artist Anish Kapoor on the wall and another glass sculpture on the floor, by the Brazilian Nuno Ramos.

Cabinets and walls finished in brushed stainless steel sheets give a certain austerity to the kitchen. In the center, a bench with attached seats stands out.

The apartment is also provided with a 17 meter corridor with access to the other spaces (gym and master suite) like a gallery. A special room was also created, used as a collection room for the clients’ collection. It is worth noting that a system of electrified rails and directional spots with special lamps were installed throughout the apartment, so that the lighting does not damage the works and, if they are changed, the lighting design can be easily adapted, as in a museum.

JCA HOUSE

JCA House is a summer residence in Bahia, which would also be used with some frequency during other seasons of the year. A house to walk around barefoot, with a contemporary spatial organization without losing the regional essence.

The house is built on a large wooden platform raised from the ground. On it, two independent volumes receive part of the program: in the smaller block are located the master suite, kitchen, pantry and toilet; in the largest block, five suites. A large gable roof and a rectangular projection unifies the volumes and create new spaces with large ceilings that give way to the living and dining rooms in addition to the circulation galleries. In the basement are located other service rooms and an intimate room with home theater. The large wooden deck connects the house to the pool and to the leisure and coexistence annex located at the other end of the land.

The house takes place on only one floor, avoiding further interference in the landscape. The large Cumaru wooden platform releases the house from the land, which contributes to reducing the effects of humidity. The project also has cross ventilation systems due to the breadth of spaces and openings.

We prioritize the integration between exterior and interior through design decisions such as: continuity of the floor from the exterior to the interior; permeability of the closings – an element hollowed out in the style of a wooden cobogó along the facade of the entire circulation gallery that has the function of filtering the solar lighting at the same time that it generates privacy and allows cross ventilation; frames with shutters in the rooms; glass planes guaranteeing transparency and possibilities of total openings in the common area; creation of internal gardens in the accesses to the suites.

On the other hand, contemporary solutions evoke regional and traditional ambiences and imaginations: the gable roof with clay tiles in contrast to the bold wooden structure; the volumes of the independent blocks of the roof and the resulting free spaces conform to the common areas with a direct relationship with the exterior, valuing the spatiality of the balcony, or with an indirect relationship, as is the case with the circulation gallery, protected by the Brazilian architectural element cobogó (in this case reinterpreted through a wooden weave).