Pascali Semerdjian Arquitetos Crafts A Modern Home With Global Flair In São Paulo

Before she met Domingos Pascali and Sarkis Semerdjian, the architects who would spend four years on her family’s recently completed São Paulo home, and even before she started her year-long search for the elusive piece of land on which to build it, the art educator and entrepreneur, Andrea Guerra, fell in love with a small table they’d designed. That piece, with its slender stone top and undulant, ribbed base in stainless steel, was part of a 2018 capsule collection by Pascali Semerdjian Arquitetos for the prominent São Paulo furniture gallery Etel. “I was the first person to have it,” Guerra recalls, still delighted by the coincidence. “Mine was number-one out of the factory.”

Guerra didn’t meet Pascali and Semerdjian until two years later, as she interviewed firms for the house project, but the rapport was immediate. Guerra was as interested in the building itself as she was in the furnishings and objects that would fill it, equal components of Pascali and Semerdjian’s eponymous practice. “In those first meetings, we spoke about literature and art and music,” Pascali recalls. “When you have a greater affinity, a stronger connection, with a client, that translates to greater liberty and a more unified architecture.”

Pascali Semerdjian Arquitetos Highlights Brazilian Craft In This Home

Guerra and her husband had been in their previous home in the leafy Jardim Europa neighborhood for 15 years and, when they realized they simply needed more space, they’d initially hoped to find a turnkey in the same neighborhood or, at worst, a house they could renovate. When nothing appeared, they settled for a level, well-proportioned lot with a neocolonial house they felt no qualms about demolishing. For the new project, Guerra sought spaces that would support, rather than distract from, her growing art collection and, though she knew she wanted to avoid replicating the suspended wooden boxes that have proliferated around São Paulo’s affluent areas, she also “didn’t want something that would stand out in the middle of the street.”

Pascali and Semerdjian’s solution to Guerra’s brief emerged almost immediately. The house would list toward the western edge of the rectangular lot, opening an L-shaped garden at street level. Upstairs, three bedrooms, each with its own bath, a small gym, and the main bedroom suite would occupy five interconnected volumes turned at 45-degree angles, like prisms, over the ground floor’s footprint in order to face due north, the sunniest exposure in the southern hemisphere. That gesture broke up the 7,800-square-foot house’s massing and created a natural setback from the road, which the architects emphasized with a freestanding breezeblock partition, or Brazilian cobogó, of prefabricated concrete capsules fit together like oversized chainmail. From the street, the residence would resolve as a horizontal band of aluminum, almost maritime in its streamlined simplicity, with the concrete screen rising above it like a widow’s walk, providing privacy for the bedrooms. The sawtooth upper level also opened apertures for skylights and interior gardens on the ground floor while generating “spaces that would reveal themselves as you move through the house,” Semerdjian says—an element of surprise that Guerra had requested from the beginning.

A Globally Inspired Spin On Brazilian Design

Turning to the interiors, she, Pascali, and Semerdjian drew inspiration from Japanese and Mexican architecture with their emphases on material simplicity, formal clarity, and blurred boundaries between nature and built space. Those references are visible in the foyer, where basalt flooring and the sucupira ceiling beams and door, almost squared in its proportions, recall the elegant rusticity of Mexican master Luis Barragán. The entry hall then opens into a broad corridor, conceived as an elongated white-cube gallery connecting Guerra’s office to the luminous living room, where the Pascali Semerdjian side table stands next to a rust-colored sofa by Italian architect Gianfranco Frattini, adding a global note. An open hearth separates the living room from the dining room, flanked by a terrace on one side—here, Pascali and Semerdjian conceived a custom bench that will enter their collection with Andrea’s name—and, on the other, an interior garden where parlor palms brush against a hanging stainless-steel work by São Paulo sculptor Renata Padovan.

Though Guerra and her family brought a clutch of items from their previous home—a pair of high-backed Cantú chairs by another Brazilian talent, Sergio Rodrigues, for instance, and a wooden stool that belonged to her grandparents—they mostly started from scratch, allowing Pascali and Semerdjian to integrate architecture and interiors. As Semerdjian says, “Sometimes you can’t resolve a space through moveable pieces—the architecture and furniture have to go together.” Here, that meant emphasizing flexibility in the public spaces with stand-alone furnishings from such contemporary Brazilian designers as Leonardo Lague, Claudia Moreira Salles, and Fernando Prado, and crafting the private quarters around freijo built-ins.

Sliding panels in another wood, weather-resistant Accoya, shield the glass doors that open from the bedrooms onto a rooftop garden. Rather than the tropical proliferation of broad-leafed philodendrons and calatheas typical of São Paulo gardens, Guerra had the roof planted with native grasses, euphorbias, and mother-in-law’s tongue, an austere, slow-growing landscape inspired by Mexican garden design that connects Guerra and her family to distant worlds and experiences. “It is the first thing I see when I wake up each morning and always makes me happy,” she says: the surprise of an alien beauty, which is also, always, a quiet provocation to explore.

Walk Through This Minimalist Home With A Desert Garden Twist

International Roots Shape This Home By Pascali Semerdjan Arquitetos

PASCALI SEMERDJIAN ARQUITETOS: FÁBIO RUDNIK; RODRIGO GUERRA; SUZANA KNOBEL; TALI LIBERMAN; INAÊ NEGRÃO; LEOPOLDO SCHETTINO; JOÃO PAULO MACHADO; GABRIELA MOURAD; AINE OLIVEIRA. RENATA TILLI: LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT. CONSTRUMAR: CIVIL ENGINEER. D’FRANÇA MÓVEIS: WOODWORK. DIX METAIS: METALWORK.

FROM FRONT
TRESUNO: CUSTOM SCREEN (ROOF GARDEN). BALI MADEIRAS: PERGOLA (ENTRY HALL). PHENICIA CONCEPT: RUG (LIVING ROOM). TOQUE FINAL CORTINAS: CURTAINS. TACCHINI: SLIPPER CHAIRS, SOFA. ARFLEX: ARMCHAIRS. SANTA & COLE: LAMP. TABLERIA: CUSTOM BENCH. MICASA: COCKTAIL TABLE (LIVING ROOM), TABLE (DINING ROOM). ETEL: MAGAZINE STAND (LIVING ROOM), BENCH (TERRACE). DPOT: CHAIRS (DINING ROOM, TERRACE). OVO: CHAIRS (BREAKFAST NOOK). MULA PRETA: CHAIR (BEDROOM). PSDS: BENCH. LABLUZ: SCONCES (BATHROOM). DECA: SINK FITTINGS, TUB FILLER. VALLVÉ: TUB. CASA ATICA: TABLE (TERRACE). PUNTO: SINK FITTINGS (POWDER ROOM). VIDROS QUEIROZ: CUSTOM MIRROR. THROUGHOUT EUROMARBLE: STONE FLOORING. LUMISYSTEM: CUSTOM WINDOWS. STO CORP.: PAINT.

4 Striking Home Accents For Entertaining

These made-in-America home accents add character—and fun—to any home. From an elevated billiards table to sculptural ottomans, take a look at these chic finds.

Alex Mutter-Rottmayer and Austin Carrier of Haus of Hommeboys

Product: Bishop.
Standout: The debut line of the Sonoma, California, atelier includes three ottomans in different sizes made from solid wood and COM upholstery that all feature a sculptural block-and-ball base motif. hausofhommeboys.com

Hanneke Lourens of Hanneke Lourens

Product: Barred.
Standout: Handmade in her home state of California, the South African–born furniture designer’s 18-inch side table has a Brutalist feel, with stainless-steel bars connecting chunky oil-finished black-ash legs. hannekelourens.com

Marc Ange for 11 Ravens

Product: Colosso.
Standout: Crafted in California, the French-Italian artist/designer’s stone-legged billiards table—offered in 60 colors of Kvadrat upholstery—takes cues (pun intended) from his own surrealist sculptures. 11ravens.com

Phantila Phataraprasit and Jess Fügler of Sabai

Product: Bacana.
Standout: Fabricated in High Point, North Carolina, this loveseat is made for chillin’, with a frame of wide-plank FSC-certified maple (sourced from Appalachian forests) and comfy latex cushions dressed in recycled velvet.
sabai.design

Artist Andreea Avram Rusu Unveils Botanica Spiral

Artist and designer Andreea Avram Rusu explores sculptural concepts through her elegant lighting, furniture, and objects. This fall, at the Collectible design fair in New York, the Brooklyn-based talent unveiled Botanica Spiral, a new black-and-white iteration of her existing series inspired by banana flowers and the botanical gardens of Lisbon, Portugal. The dimmable LED chandelier balances a dramatically scaled bloom with a cascading chain of handblown-glass leaves, suspended from either end of a leather-clad arc; swirly decorative patterning enhances the hypnotic effect. Botanica Spiral is available in custom colors and configurations plus a two-petal sconce model. avramrusu.com

7 Residential Towers That Wow

Seven residential towers across the Americas redefine the art of dwelling above it all.

Luxurious Residential Designs With Sky-High Views

Morris Adjmi Architects

Project: The Huron, Brooklyn, New York.
Standout: The Greenpoint neighborhood’s industrial waterfront heritage is reflected in the pair of 13-story steel-and-glass towers on a rough-brick podium that comprise this 171-apartment condominium development. Inside, the urban edge is tempered by a palette of natural colors and materials. Blond wood paneling wraps the lobby, where the custom reception desk—faced in handwoven pink leather and topped with onyx—stands before a wall of glazed green tiles. It’s flanked by Elise Ferguson’s commissioned works on linen, a foretaste of the local art displayed throughout the comfortably furnished public spaces, which include an oak herringbone–floored lounge and dining room, a playroom, and spectacular 50-foot-long saltwater pool lined with teak-framed chaises.

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Studio Arthur Casas

Project: Ibaté, São Paulo.
Standout: The area’s transitional nature—urban verticality giving way to suburban expansiveness—is reflected in the 30-story building’s raw-concrete facade: a hanging garden of full-length terraces and carefully positioned planters draped with trailing vegetation. With one apartment per 4,800-square-foot floor, plus a penthouse duplex, the usual spatial constraints of metropolitan living feel relaxed. The transition between city and home is via an elevator lobby open to a cobblestone court with a Corten sculpture by Túlio Pinto and a lush garden. Glass walls enclose the adjacent lap pool, so that here, art, leisure, and nature all converge. By contrast, the adjoining party room is a cocoon of pale oak millwork, smooth acrylic-plaster finishes, sleek sintered-stone flooring, and comfortable contemporary Brazilian furniture.“The building prioritizes spatial quality and integration with the urban environment, focusing on structural clarity, conscious use of materials, and enhancing common areas”

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Atelier Gulla; SCB; Works Architecture

Project: Alloy, Los Angeles.
Standout: The Arts District’s first high-rise development comprises a podium and six-story commercial building by Works, along with SCB’s 35-story, 475-unit residential tower. For the public spaces, Gulla Jónsdóttir channeled the neighborhood’s layered, industrial past by drawing on kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with precious metals so the cracks are highlighted. Hence the gold seams that run like jeweled fault lines across concrete walls in the lobby and third-floor lounge. The latter offers intimate booths moodily lit by Massimo Castagna’s brass sconces, convivial seating groups featuring Draga & Aurel’s swiveling chairs, and direct openness to the pool deck. High above, amid rooftop seating, a tree is growing through a massive concrete oculus.

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Rhode Partners

Project: The Linden, Austin, Texas.
Standout: A sculptural white-onyx reception desk and commissioned stainless-steel or plaster wall reliefs by Brandon Mike announce the contemporary museum–inflected ambience defining this 28-story, 117-apartment tower, which includes eight levels of parking. Upstairs, the residences’ clean-lined custom millwork, flooring of oak herringbone or parquet, and marble counters continue the sophisticated urban vibe. But it’s the amenity spaces on 10—among them private dining, coworking, sauna, and colonnaded terrace with pool—that epitomize the art-world aura, not least the double-height lounge, where low-slung sectional sofas are overlooked by Patrick Puckett’s figurative painting from the Linden’s collection.

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Anda Andrei Design; Arquitectonica; Gabellini Sheppard Associates

Project: Five Park Miami Beach, Florida.
Standout: Anda Andrei and Gabellini Sheppard have given the interiors of Arquitectonica’s 48-story, 280-unit elliptical tower a tropical vibrancy balanced by cool sophistication. The mix is especially evident across the 50,000 square feet of amenities, notably in the residents-only Canopy Club—a 26th-floor social hub that includes the aptly named Mint Lounge and Plum Bar, intimate spaces with hand-plastered walls in rich, evocative colors inspired by Moroccan hurricane lamps. The assured mood-setting continues on the third floor with the Cinema, a versatile events venue featuring Hans Hopfer’s hippie-de-luxe Mah Jong reconfigurable seating; the saturated pigments and crisp graphics enlivening the adjacent game room walls; and Hervé Descottes’s Breuer-esque overhead lighting grid in the airy coworking lounge.

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Clodagh Design; HKS; Lake Flato

Project: 700 River Street, Austin, Texas.
Standout: HKS and Lake Flato’s 43-story, 377-unit rental building features warmly biophilic common areas and model apartments courtesy of team Clodagh, guided by the five elements of Chinese cosmology—wood, fire, earth, metal, water—expressed through materials, textures, and tones. Hence the Eric Gushee biomorphic woven-wire sculpture on the clay-colored plaster wall above the lobby fireplace, bookended by illuminated oak-millwork niches punctuated with live plants. Flanking the reception desk, water streams from a lip nestled in a column of greenery, filling a pebble-lined pool and bringing the sound of nature indoors. That connection is exemplified on the 12th-floor amenities deck, where the infinity pool appears to merge seamlessly with Lady Bird Lake just across the street.

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SCB; Tihany Design

Project: Victoria Place, Honolulu.
Standout: SCB’s 40-story, 350-unit condominium is the seventh residential tower at Ward Village, a 60-acre planned community, with immersive landscaping by Vita. Right from the open-air lobby—distinguished by giant lanterns, chiseled-coral walls, and walnut millwork—Tihany’s public spaces feel like a fluid extension of the serene setting. A retractable wall turns the ground-floor pool house into a single indoor-outdoor entertainment space, anchored by Jun Kaneko’s ceramic sculpture at the end of the enclosed garden. Art also graces the spa lobby on the fifth-floor amenities deck, where Pegge Hopper’s Gauguinesque diptych presides over Vincent van Duysen sofas and Christophe Pillet armchairs looking out on a lap pool—a match for the infinity pool on the building’s other side, backdropped by views of Diamond Head.

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Fran Silvestre Designs A Home Outside Barcelona In Dialogue With Nature

Spanish architect Fran Silvestre is a master of geometry. At first, his minimalist white constructions appear to be abstract interlopers in the natural landscape. But there’s a rigorous, sensitive logic behind every plan. Such is the case at a 3,875-square-foot, three-bedroom house in Caldes de Malavella, just north of Barcelona.

Long and narrow, the 1/4-acre plot within Camiral, a luxury golf resort, could have been limiting. But for Silvestre, CEO of Valencia-based Fran Silvestre Arquitectos, and Carlos Lucas, his director of architecture, it was an opportunity to create something different: two offset volumes poised amid lush rolling hills. “The house adapts precisely to the site, with each gesture conceived according to light, silence, and views,” Lucas says. “The geometry dialogues with the place in a quiet yet powerful way.”

The reinforced-concrete structure, coated in a white-finish external thermal insulation system, supports a cantilevering upper volume, which shades a pool and terrace below and allows residents to inhabit separate planes, their interiors collaborated on with designer Alfaro Hofmann. A skylit, white porcelain–floored staircase that Lucas calls the heart of the house links the three planes, which comprise a subterranean multipurpose area, ground-level social spaces, and the upper bedroom floor, its enclosed balcony framing views of the golf course and beyond through a dramatic 10-by-26-foot rectangle. Masterful geometry indeed.

Virginia Sin Unveils Origami-Inspired Lighting Collection

New York designer Virginia Sin, who works out of a studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, unveils Gami, a collection of lighting fixtures inspired by the delicate folds of origami. Rather than make the shades out of paper, however, Sin translates these ethereal forms into something more substantial and enduring: clay. Each piece is crafted from sand-speckled stoneware, air-dried and then double-fired—a process that required extensive experimentation to perfect. “By grounding these paper-inspired shapes in ceramic, the pieces move beyond their muse, becoming luminous objects that invite curiosity, warmth, and a touch of poetry,” Sin explains. The series spans table lamps, flush-mounts, and sconces like the Double Shai, and comes full circle with the Shayd pendant, which features a French parchment-paper shade that returns to the collection’s original origami inspiration. virginiasin.com

See Man Ray’s Textiles On Display In This New York Exhibit

Emmanuel “Manny” Radnitzky was born in South Philadelphia and grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he earned a scholarship to study architecture. These are perhaps lesser-known facts about the prolific 20th-century artist Man Ray, who lived much of his life in Paris. Another Easter egg may be that, although he was most famous for his surrealist photography, paintings, and films, Ray also made textiles. For the first time in the U.S., and in conjunction with his retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 10 of them are on display in “Man Ray: The Revolving Doors Tapestries,” at Boccara Gallery in New York. The origin of the series dates to 1916, when Ray produced colorful collages of cut construction paper that he assembled into rhythmic, art deco–influenced geometric shapes and displayed on interactive stands that viewers could rotate (like a revolving door). In 1973, three years before Ray’s death but under his direction, the Parisian weaving workshop Atelier 3 translated the collages into nearly 7-foot-tall tapestries. Along with giving his art newfound depth, tactility, and longevity, such woven works as Long Distance and Concrete Mixer capture Ray’s playful subversion and fascination with motion.

Editor’s note: Among the 10 pieces appearing in “Man Ray: The Revolving Doors Tapestries,” through February 1 at New York’s Boccara Gallery, which specializes in modern and antique tapestries as well as collaborations that bridge fine art and craftsmanship, are The Meeting, Long Distance, and Legend, all 59 by 79 inches, translated in 1973 by Atelier 3 from paper collages Ray made in 1916, and handwoven of wool.

The Making Of A Sculpture That Speaks To Impermanence

Awarded the Serpentine Pavilion commission in London, architect Marina Tabassum conceived a luminous structure that embodied her firm’s focus on climate and equality, temporary and long-lasting. “Our concept reflected on the transient nature of the commission, which appeared to us as a capsule of memory and time, of permanence and impermanence,” she says.

Behind-the-Design of Marina Tabassum’s Serpentine Pavilion Commission

• 36 designers, engineers, ad technical advisors led by Marina Tabassum
• 102 feet long
• 600 polycarbonate panels
• 5 colors of film
• one gingko tree

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In the early stages of designing A Capsule in Time, the 2025 Serpentine Pavilion temporary installation last summer on the grounds of London’s Serpentine Galleries, Marina Tabassum Architects founder Marina Tabassum hand-sketched ideas for an elongated, segmented structure built around a semi-mature tree and inspired by cloth-and-bamboo Shamiyana, open-air tents erected for weddings in Bangladesh, Tabassum’s native country, that are both reusable and rooted to place.

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Her concept came to life with technical support from AECOM and manufacturing expertise by Stage One Creative Services, which fabricated custom steel frames for the pavilion’s vaulted roof in its Tockwith facility.

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The steel framed glulam ribs that were later fitted with hundreds of polycarbonate panels covered with translucent film in golden coffee and tea shades.

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After a temporary foundation was built on-site, the team installed the glulam ribs that would form the pavilion’s four sections.

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After a temporary foundation was built on-site, the team installed the glulam ribs that would form the pavilion’s four sections.

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One section was kinetic, positioned on a concealed track so it could slide and be open to the elements, like a Shamiyana.

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Bisecting MTA’s A Capsule in Time was a courtyard with the 27-foot gingko, which was chosen for its climate-change tolerance and, during the June 6 to October 26 run, how its leaves shift from green to a panel-complementary yellow and has been replanted in Kensington Gardens.

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The 2025 installation was especially meaningful as it kickstarted the 25th anniversary of the commission, which initially launched with a structure by the late Dame Zaha Hadid and continues her ethos of pushing the boundaries of architecture—something Tabassum, whose work strives to improve living conditions for the marginalized, landing her on Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People list last year, exemplifies.

Wild Things: Cuff Studio Introduces Trade-Exclusive Collection

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Animal prints are always in fashion, a foolproof way to bring energy and texture to any interior scheme. (Hard to believe they were once considered totally daring.) Cuff Studio, the L.A.-based space cofounded by Kristi Bender and Wendy Schwartz, mines such exotic motifs in the trade-exclusive Wild Things collection, handmade in California. The Arc chair, inspired by swooping architecture, is fully upholstered in leopard-print velvet for playful contrast. Barrel-backed and low-profile, the C Back chair flaunts a frame covered in almond-colored leather and Scalamandré Tigre silk cushions. The three-legged Triangle stool, with its hand-forged iron frame and cheetah-print hair-on-hide topper, has a secret: a silk tassel dangling from the seat’s underside (like a tiny tail, perhaps?). Finally, there’s the cheetah Rippling Bunching stool, inspired by Jean Royère, with iron ball-foot details. For something a little less animalistic, try Tulip, an oak counter-height stool with an eye-catching wavy back swathed in chartreuse velvet. 

How Gantri Made Enables Top Brands To Bring Lighting To Life

Lead times, schmead times! Gantri, the San Francisco–based lighting company, introduces Gantri Made, a product-development and digital-manufacturing platform that offers a fast, simplified, cost-efficient, and sustainable process for brands to develop and scale their own products—all made in San Leandro, California. The company’s own lighting designs are crafted from its proprietary biodegradable Plant Polymers, which are derived from non-GMO sugarcane. That same material, which can be translucent or sanded and painted, is also available to Gantri Made users and manufacturers. Haworth recently produced lamps on the platform, collaborating with Ammunition on 1970’s-esque Gio and with Prowl on Rae, Luna, and Beam, a trio of 3D-printed lamps that boasts softly curved silhouettes and a refined, sculptural look. Collectible furniture upstart Rarify’s Cube One houses a Gantri-made lighting unit in a frame made from vintage and new USM Haller components. And L.A. manufacturer RAD leveraged the platform’s flexibility for Little Dot, inspired by the gridded perforations of Jean Prouvé building facades. gantri.com