Casa da rua Escócia is located in a verdant part of São Paulo. Designed by local studio FGMF Arquitetos, the new house doesn’t cover the largest floor area. Instead, clever design plays spatial tricks with the site to maximise the sensation of being immersed in nature. As the architects note, the house was ‘conceived as an exercise in restraint, the project prioritizes the outdoors, turning the garden into its true protagonist.’
Casa da rua Escócia, São Paulo by FGMF Arquitetos
From above, the house wraps around its site, presenting a boundary wall to its neighbours whilst breaking up into a series of angular, fractured spaces overlooking the slim garden plot. This façade is clad in wood and punctured by flush-fitting shutters that can be opened up to reveal sliding glazing within.
The garden facade features flush-fitting wooden shutters
The ground floor can be entirely opened up to the garden, with the cantilevered forms on the levels above providing varying levels of shade throughout the day. There is a certain poetic intent here,’ the architects write, ‘these volumes evoke tree canopies, gently shading and protecting the path below, where slender pillars — like trunks — define a small, constructed grove.’
View of the house from the garden
It is certainly a verdant space. Densely layered sub-tropical planting terminates every vista, adding to the feeling of a house immersed in nature. Clever planning creates a multiplicity of angles out, across and through between interior and exterior space, an effect heightened still further by the sliding glass doors opening off the ground floor reception spaces and animated by the play of light from the pool.
The double-height living room
The main reception space is reached directly off the main entrance. This is a double-height area that forms the core of the house, bisected by a first-floor level bridge that unites the bedroom areas. There’s also a sunken media room on this level; here, the light is modulated with just a slit of glass revealing the garden.
Outside, a generous terrace includes covered areas as well as space for a barbeque and dining area and a patio adjoining the pool. The house splits the site to allow for a smaller, more private terrace at the rear.
FGMF Arquitetos
The main staircase leads up to what the architects call the ‘tree canopy’, a level with family bedrooms and a guest suite above the media room. The structure uses a combination of poured concrete and steel frame. The concrete is exposed at the rear and side boundaries to serve as an enclosure that disguises what is within, while a more lightweight timber-clad steel structure is used for the first floor level. In this respect, the house’s construction mirrors the sense of a visceral, earthy ground level beneath a canopy of timber and vegetation.
Views from outside in
Views from inside out
‘This is a house of modest footprint but remarkable spatial richness,’ say FGMF, a firm founded by Lourenço Gimenes, Rodrigo Marcondes Ferraz and Fernando Forte. ‘It is a place where architecture dissolves into landscape, and where every gesture seems to invite the eye outward, as if the house itself were almost not there.’
