On the outside, it’s a humble and unassuming house, a simple gabled white box squeezed in by its neighbors on a São Paulo street, unadorned except for piercing red window frames. But inside it opens up like a cathedral, with a ceiling soaring 40 feet above a nave-like atrium that runs the height of the building’s three stories. It’s illuminated by daylight from above and a wall of windows—framed in the same shocking red—in the rear of the house that separates the kitchen from, well, the kitchen.

Fernanda Saturni and Thiago Cunha built an indoor/outdoor home with dueling kitchens. From the street, it looks like a milk carton." layout="" credit="Add credit" photoUserId=""/>

On the interior, a conventional kitchen continues right up to the window wall, which opens via sliding doors to a courtyard-like outdoor room, and the other kitchen, the open-air counterpart to the interior space. The countertops and cooking surfaces seem to pass through the glass to create one continuous culinary line. It’s the most memorable move in a home designed to give a sense of being in nature on a narrow urban lot.

“It feels like nature really comes into the house from both sides,” says Fernanda Saturni, on a sunny summer morning that has her dogs riled up with energy. “There are no closed off spaces.” She lives here with her husband, Thiago Cunha, who always dreamed of building a house from the ground up. “We wanted something modern and minimalist, but also in direct contact with nature,” says Thiago.

Fernanda and Thiago had recently returned from a few years living in Colombia and were renting an apartment a block away when they began working on building a home. From their old balcony, they could see a little house camouflaged by big trees on a narrow twenty-foot-wide lot sandwiched between a school and a podcast studio. They looked into it and soon learned that the house was on the market. They thought about salvaging the old construction somehow and adapting it to their needs, but the small, single-story home was in bad shape with significant structural problems and couldn’t be saved.

“The challenge was to make this little house seem so spacious you could have a tree growing inside it.”
—Thiago Cunha, resident

Architect Tito Ficarelli dreamed big for the new structure, and on the cramped lot, that meant letting height and those connections to the outdoors make the home feel as large as possible. His design spans the site with a simple concrete shell filled with partial levels stacked at odd intervals and connected by a light, white metal mesh staircase that is almost invisible against the bright white walls. A landing halfway up the stair leads to an outdoor terrace kissed by the sun with a view of the city’s skyline and framed by the trees preserved on the grounds.

Though the home is defined by its precise geometries, it manages to create a space where everything flows together. “We are used to the idea in modern architecture to treat the outside as landscape paintings, always horizontal,” Ficarelli says. “This house is an invitation to live a vertical life. It’s like climbing up into a tree house, seeing the many layers of a forest or wandering up through a big cave. There is no clear division between inside and outside.” It’s a cliché, to be sure, but from the dueling kitchens to the terrace, at this house, it’s absolutely true.

Project Credits:

Architect: Arkitito / @arkitito

Builder: Aimbere Construcao / @aimbereconstrucao

Landscape Design: Estudio Roza / @estudioroza

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