Ana Sawaia Arquitetura Restores Vilanova Artigas's 1956 Muxarabi House in São Paulo

Vilanova Artigas designed the Muxarabi House in 1956, and seven decades later it still reads as a clear statement. It is a white rectangular volume lifted on pilotis, held in a regular reinforced-concrete grid, with a continuous upper veranda wrapped in lattice screens. In 2025 Ana Sawaia Arquitetura, led by Ana Luiza Sawaia with Juliana Baumgart, completed a 411 m² renovation of the house. Their task was harder than it sounds: make a mid-century São Paulo house work for contemporary domestic life without blurring the logic that made it worth keeping.

What interests us is how little the renovation tries to announce itself. The structural grid, the lifted box and the muxarabi veranda all stay legible. The intervention happens in the layer you live with every day: the floors, the kitchen, the stair, the light, the furniture and the relationship to the garden. It is a useful case study in restraint. The architect treats the original house as a framework that should be tuned rather than one that needs to be argued with.

A White Box Held Above the Garden

From the outside, the parti is unmistakable. The upper floor sits as a single white volume, its faces read as a field of lattice panels, and the ground floor drops away into glass. Raising the private rooms frees the ground plane for the garden, a move that defined a generation of Paulista houses, and here it still feels generous rather than doctrinaire.

The palms and planting by LF Paisagismo do real work in these views. They soften the hard edge of the box and blur the line between the covered living area and the open garden, so the pilotis read as a shaded clearing rather than a car port with pretensions.

The Muxarabi Veranda as Climate Device

The house takes its name from this element, and it earns it. A narrow gallery runs the length of the upper floor between the bedroom doors and the outer lattice. The bedrooms face northeast and take the morning sun, and the screens filter that sun into a moving pattern of dots across the tiled floor.

This is passive environmental design that predates the vocabulary we now use for it. The veranda acts as a buffer zone: it tempers heat and glare before they reach the rooms, gives the bedrooms a semi-outdoor threshold, and lets the occupants open the house without losing privacy. The renovation's best decision is to leave this logic intact.

Bedrooms Behind the Lattice

Inside the bedrooms, the lattice comes back as timber-framed doors, so the screen becomes something you can operate as well as look through. Opened, they connect the room to the veranda; closed, they still pass light and air. A wood-headed bed and patterned rugs keep the rooms warm against the white shell.

The bathroom takes a different tack. Pale tiles flecked with blue, a lit niche and a skylight turn a small enclosed room into a bright one. It is a contemporary insertion, but its reliance on daylight from above echoes the rest of the house.

A Ground Floor That Belongs to the Garden

Below the bedrooms, large glass panels make the living spaces feel continuous with the garden. Concrete columns stand freely in the room, and the planting comes right up to the glazing. In one view a palm trunk and ferns frame the living room so closely that the interior reads as an extension of the courtyard.

Sawaia avoids heavy walls here. Low shelving units divide zones without closing them off, so you can read the whole plan and the structural rhythm at once. The furniture is domestic and unfussy, and that suits a floor whose main event is the view out.

Fireplace, Column and Table

The living room is anchored by a dark stone fireplace wall, which gives weight to a floor that could otherwise feel like a glass pavilion. A board-formed concrete column stands nearby, its texture left exposed. Between them sit a black leather lounge chair, a blue rug, patterned floor tiles and a scatter of carved wooden animals.

Those objects matter more than they seem to. They signal that this is a lived-in family house, not a preserved museum piece, and they keep Artigas's rigorous structure from tipping into austerity. The column beside a striped basket on a shelf says it plainly: the frame is the frame, and life happens around it.

Entry, Light and Threshold

The entry hall is where you can see the renovation's layering most clearly. A glass block wall brings in diffused light, a zigzag stair rises beside a shelving divider, and the garden glows through the open door. Glass block is a mid-century material, and using it here feels like a conversation with the period rather than a costume.

The dining table sits against a glass wall facing the palm garden, set with orchids and steel-framed chairs. It is a simple arrangement, and it confirms the ground floor's priority: every principal room keeps a direct line to the outside.

A Folded Stair Under a Skylight

The stair is the most sculptural piece in the house. Folded timber treads zigzag upward above a long wooden bench, held by a slim white rod balustrade that barely registers. From below, a rectangular skylight frames sky and cloud, and it washes the white walls with daylight.

This vertical slot does useful environmental and spatial work. It pulls light into the core of the plan and turns the trip between the public ground floor and the private upper floor into a small event. The timber links back to the bedroom screens, so material threads the two levels together.

Yellow Cabinets and Green Glass

The kitchen is where the renovation allows itself colour. Yellow cabinets, a white island, open dish shelving and a ribbed green glass sliding panel create a bright, almost graphic room. High windows above the double sink keep the garden in view even while you work.

The green glass panel is a clever detail. It separates the kitchen from the dining area without blocking light, and it frames a painting beyond with a soft blur. It is the same idea as the muxarabi, in a different material: a screen that filters rather than closes.

Plans and Drawings

The plans show the strict two-level organisation: garden, parking and living spaces on the ground level, bedrooms and bathrooms above. The drawing that marks existing, demolished and new construction in different line colours is the most telling. It makes the renovation legible as a set of deliberate edits to Artigas's house rather than a wholesale rewrite.

The elevations show the raised volume on columns, the gridded upper panel and the exterior stair. The perspective sketch is annotated by hand with restoration notes around the pilotis terrace and palms, a reminder that work on heritage houses starts with close reading of what is already there.

The two axonometric cutaways show the ground floor from opposite sides: the yellow kitchen block, the dining table, the lounge and the partitions. They confirm what the photographs suggest, that the ground level works as one continuous field with objects placed in it, not as a sequence of rooms.

Why This Project Matters

Brazil's modernist housing stock is a cultural asset, and much of it is under pressure from demolition, neglect or heavy-handed updates. The Muxarabi House offers a better model. Ana Sawaia Arquitetura keeps the elements that carry Artigas's thinking, namely the structural grid, the pilotis and the screened veranda, and concentrates new work on surfaces, services and furnishing. The house gets the comforts it needs, and the original idea survives.

There is also a lesson here for climate-conscious design. The muxarabi veranda handles sun, heat and privacy with no mechanical help, and it has done so since 1956. When a renovation recognises that an old house already performs well and builds on that, it does more than preserve history. It shows that some of the best answers to current problems were drawn decades ago.

Muxarabi House by Ana Sawaia Arquitetura (lead architect Ana Luiza Sawaia, project team Juliana Baumgart), renovation of the 1956 house by Vilanova Artigas. Location: São Paulo, Brazil. Area: 411 m². Year: 2025. Photography: Nelson Kon.

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