When art dealer Eduardo Leme was a boy in São Paulo, he used to look out with endless fascination at a striking modernist house two blocks away. It was the home of Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha.
When Leme saw a ‘For Sale’ sign outside another da Rocha concrete bunker-style house in the city, he decided to buy it. Known as Casa Millán, it had been built in 1969 for another art dealer, Fernando Millán, and was in serious need of a facelift. Leme called on da Rocha himself to fix it up and a friendship was formed – which resulted the architect building Leme the São Paulo art gallery he owns today.
As for the updated residence, ‘the concrete gives the house a very informal feel’, says Leme. ‘It’s the sort of place where you feel at home in shorts and a T-shirt.’ The relaxed vibe is added to by the fact that the house overlooks a quiet local park teeming with monkeys and super-sized vegetation, and has a swimming pool in the garden.
The iron and leather chairs in the living room are by Flávio de Carvalho. The photo on the wall is one of Vik Muniz’s works in chocolate, and below it on the console are works by Ernesto Neto and Caito. A Shinako Sato sculpture sits on the side table.
The kitchen was originally next to the living room, ‘so that the maids could listen to Millán’s opera and he could hear their radio soap operas.’ This was too fluid an arrangement for the Leme family. They were after some privacy and child-free zones, so they moved the kitchen to the basement, put in extra windows to divide up rooms and knocked down the walls of the bedrooms to make them bigger.
The house is spacious, even for an art collector. ‘We don’t have many windows but we do have lots of walls, which is fantastic.’ Leme began collecting art, when he still worked in finance. Later, he founded Galeria Leme, which specialises in ahead-of-the-curve works from a global mix of emerging artists, and is located in an area near the Jockey Club (also designed by da Rocha).
Many of Leme’s best-loved pieces are on display in the house, along with 1950s furniture from the likes of Flávio de Carvalho and finds from his favourite flea market in Praça Benedito Calixto. For him, the house sums up Brazilian brutalism in the best possible way. §
A version of this story was featured in the May 2006 issue of Wallpaper* (W*88)
A spiral staircase leads up to the bedrooms. Beneath it is a cardboard table and chair by Brazilian group 100T and a piece by Brazilian sculptor Marepe.
A bust by Evan Penny is mounted in the entrance to the living room. The chair is from a flea-market and the canvas is by Dora Bahia
The second living room has a 2 sq m fireplace. The sofa and the chair, more flea-market finds, are in jacaranda wood
-
How Billecart-Salmon became the hospitality industry’s champagne of choiceNeil Ridley ventures into a subterranean temple to patience and precision beneath the village of Aÿ-Champagne, France, and discovers a winery not of spectacle, but of soul
-
In Baku Sakashita’s new lighting collection, hand-dyed silk threads are delicately illuminatedIn ‘Haku’, ultra-fine LEDs are woven within plant-dyed threads, showcasing intricacy, artistry and traditional Japanese craftsmanship
-
Discover the chic simplicity of CC-Steding jewelleryNic Farnan and Ben Chaplin create delicate silver jewellery in their east London studio
-
Cascading greenery softens the brutalist façade of this Hyderabad homeThe monolithic shell of this home evokes a familiar brutalist narrative, but designer 23 Degrees Design Shift softens the aesthetic by shrouding Antriya in lush planting
-
Spice up the weekly shop at Mallorca’s brutalist supermarketIn this brutalist supermarket, through the use of raw concrete, monolithic forms and modular elements, designer Minimal Studio hints at a critique of consumer culture
-
‘Brutalist Berlin’ is an essential new guide for architectural tourists heading to the cityBlue Crow Media’s ‘Brutalist Berlin’ unveils fifty of the German capital’s most significant concrete structures and places them in their historical context
-
Celebrate the angular joys of 'Brutal Scotland', a new book from Simon Phipps'Brutal Scotland' chronicles one country’s relationship with concrete; is brutalism an architectural bogeyman or a monument to a lost era of aspirational community design?
-
Three lesser-known Danish modernist houses track the country’s 20th-century architectureWe visit three Danish modernist houses with writer, curator and architecture historian Adam Štěch, a delve into lower-profile examples of the country’s rich 20th-century legacy
-
The Architecture Edit: Wallpaper’s houses of the monthThis September, Wallpaper highlighted a striking mix of architecture – from iconic modernist homes newly up for sale to the dramatic transformation of a crumbling Scottish cottage. These are the projects that caught our eye
-
A beautifully crafted concrete family house in a Mexican suburb is a contemplative oasisHW Studio have shaped a private house from raw concrete, eschewing Brutalist forms in favour of soft light, enclosed spaces and delicate geometries
-
Richard Neutra's Case Study House #20, an icon of Californian modernism, is for salePerched high up in the Pacific Palisades, a 1948 house designed by Richard Neutra for Dr Bailey is back on the market
