Tour the sanctuary of Rua Polonia House in São Paulo, Brazil

Step inside the secret haven of Rua Polonia House — (Image credit: Pedro Kok)

Rua Polonia House sits discreetly in its leafy, residential street, a quiet haven just a stone's throw from São Paulo's bustling city centre. The home, designed by a team comprising Gabriel Kogan and Guilherme Pianca, who worked together with Clara Werneck on the project, is the neighbourhood's latest addition – offering a calm sanctuary for its residents.

Step inside the secret haven of Rua Polonia House, a minimalist house in sao paulo

Explore the secret haven of Rua Polonia House

The architecture team worked on both the building and its interiors (in collaboration on the latter with interior producer Susanna Crestani) as well as developers Mira Properties. The long and relatively narrow plot (at 42m-deep and 15m-wide) meant that the lush contemporary residence has only a hint of a presence on the street side, nodding through its minimalist architecture volume to its modern nature.

'From there, the journey through the house is structured as a sequence of framed views that emphasise the space’s frontality and depth, minimizing diagonal perspectives,' the team writes in its architecture statement.

The building was imagined as an 'infinite' grid, made up of repeating modules that make it flexible and easy to build. Each of the concrete structure's modules measures 2.90m wide and 3m high – and the home spans two storeys high in total, featuring communal spaces on the ground level and sleeping quarters upstairs.

The architects worked on a design that celebrates clarity and honesty. They explain: 'We sought to move in the opposite direction of decorative trends that seek for several layers of overlapping materials, disconnected from architectural function. In this house, we aimed to converge function, materials, and finishes. Wooden panels serve as doors or bookshelves, for example.'

'The cement floor is simply the floor itself. The glass in the frame is the window itself. The concrete is the structure itself, and so on. Even in spaces such as the bathrooms and kitchen, material choices prioritized ease of maintenance, cleanliness, and durability, minimizing arbitrary design decisions.'

Large strip openings that nod to the country's legacy of tropical modernist architecture look out to the property's leafy green garden. A gently sunken floor in the ground-level living spaces ensures users feel immersed in this verdant envelope, created by landscape designer Rodrigo Oliveira.

Yet this is not a simple repetition of or homage to past popular styles in the country. 'We brought our experience from previous projects and our studies of architecture from other countries, such as Japan, England, Switzerland, and Portugal. We believe the project represents a meeting of different architectural schools — something that the new generation of Brazilian architects, not just us, has been striving to develop,' the team explains.

'This is no longer the São Paulo School (also known as the Paulista School) as it was understood for decades, rooted in formal evolutions of modernist masters.'

@gabrielkogan

@guilhermepianca

TOPICS

Ellie Stathaki is the Architecture & Environment Director at Wallpaper*. She trained as an architect at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and studied architectural history at the Bartlett in London. Now an established journalist, she has been a member of the Wallpaper* team since 2006, visiting buildings across the globe and interviewing leading architects such as Tadao Ando and Rem Koolhaas. Ellie has also taken part in judging panels, moderated events, curated shows and contributed in books, such as The Contemporary House (Thames & Hudson, 2018), Glenn Sestig Architecture Diary (2020) and House London (2022).