André Guerra Arquitetos and Douglas Vicentini Rework a São Paulo House Around Its Brick Walls and Garden

Renovation projects in São Paulo usually face a familiar temptation: gut the old house, keep the lot, and start again. The Mooca House, completed in 2024 by André Guerra Arquitetos and Douglas Vicentini, who also coordinated the work, refuses that shortcut. The 400 m² project keeps the existing structure in the Mooca district and offers a contemporary reading of it, revealing and reinterpreting what was already there instead of erasing it.

What interests us is the discipline involved. The before and after images show a plain white house turned into something warmer and more textured, yet the roofline, the plan logic and the overall massing still belong to the original building. The architects work through a small set of moves: brick left visible, oak inserted as furniture-scale joinery, a reworked street threshold and a garden that does much of the atmospheric work. It is a lesson in how far subtraction and careful addition can take an ordinary house.

A Perforated Gate Replaces the Garage Front

From the street, the house gives very little away. A rusted, perforated steel gate now stands where the frontage once read as a hedge and a garage. The clay-tiled roof barely shows above it. For a dense urban district like Mooca, this is the right posture: the gate filters views and light without turning the house into a fortress, and its weathered surface already looks like it belongs to the neighbourhood.

Just inside, the material story begins. An exposed brick wall sits under a thin, projecting roof edge, and a slim tree trunk rises through dense philodendron planting. The landscape design by Eiji Taninaka Paisajista is not decoration here; it is the first room you pass through.

The Garden Facade and the Pool

The rear of the house is where the transformation is most legible. A brick upper volume rises above glazed doors, and a green-tiled pool and palms occupy the foreground. The green tile is a smart choice: it reads as an extension of the planting rather than a resort-blue insertion, so pool and garden merge into one landscape.

That relationship carries into the private rooms. A bedroom opens through a dark-framed sliding glass door onto a small courtyard of banana-leaf plants. Even the most enclosed spaces in the house get their own slice of garden, which matters in a city where outdoor space is scarce.

Before and After: Reading the Original House

The split images are worth studying closely, because they show how restrained the intervention really is. The rear facade keeps its proportions and roof; what changes is surface, openings and landscape. The street view swaps a hedged garage frontage for the steel gate. The side passage moves from a bare paved corridor to a planted walk along exposed brick.

None of these moves requires demolition on a large scale, and that is the point. The project shows that a house can gain a new identity mainly by stripping away finishes and adding soil, rather than by rebuilding.

A Kitchen Built Around a Long Table

The kitchen and dining area run as one continuous space. A long timber dining table with green upholstered chairs faces a white kitchen run, and a strip window above the counter brings in daylight at working height. The green of the chairs picks up the pool tile and the garden, a small but consistent decision that ties inside to outside.

Timber-framed windows along the dining side catch the warm afternoon sun. The room is not overdesigned; it relies on proportion, a few good materials and the length of that table to set the social centre of the house.

Painted Brick as a Living Room Backdrop

Inside, the brick is mostly painted white rather than left raw. This keeps the texture of the masonry while letting the rooms stay bright, and it gives the living area a quiet backdrop for an oak bookshelf, a grey sofa and a wall-mounted television. A cove strip washes light down the white brick, so the wall itself becomes the light fixture.

The oak shelving unit, with books, prints and trailing plants beside a white stair railing, shows how the architects use joinery: as a lived-in surface rather than a showpiece. You can tell the house was designed to be filled.

Oak Inserts for Study and Sleep

The private spaces repeat the same language at a smaller scale. A narrow study nook sits behind a white metal railing, fitted with an oak desk and wall cabinets, with a plant trailing from a shelf. It is a leftover space made useful, which is exactly what a good renovation should do.

In the bedroom, an oak headboard and floating bedside shelves sit against painted brick, flanked by swing-arm lamps. The oak pieces read as inserts set into the old shell, keeping a clear line between what was there and what is new.

Raking Light on Masonry

The best moments in the house happen when sun hits brick. A concrete window seat runs along dark-framed windows, and raking light picks out every course of the white-painted wall behind it. An oak ledge with magazines and foliage catches tree shadows moving across the masonry. In the kitchen, a long timber-clad island and a whitewashed brick wall are patterned by low golden light and leaf shadows.

This is where keeping the existing walls pays off. A new plastered wall would flatten that light; old brick, even painted, gives it something to hold onto. The concrete, wood and glass that appear throughout the photographs work as a supporting cast for that effect.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings clarify the organisation. The lower floor plan places the garage, a central service core and a kitchen with its long island toward the pool and two trees. The ground floor plan lines up four bedrooms in a row along a garden tree, with kitchen, dining and living spaces gathered at one end. It is a simple linear arrangement that keeps every room close to planting.

The section and axonometric show the hipped roof preserved and pierced by skylights, along with an exterior stair, a paved terrace and a curved pool. Bringing light down through the existing roof, rather than replacing it, is probably the clearest expression of the project's attitude toward the original house.

Why This Project Matters

São Paulo has huge stocks of ordinary mid-century houses, and many are lost to demolition because they look dated rather than because they fail structurally. The Mooca House makes a practical case for the alternative. Keep the roof, keep the walls, expose or paint the masonry, rework the thresholds and let landscape take on more of the work. The result feels contemporary without pretending the old house never existed.

For architects facing similar briefs, the takeaway is restraint with intent. André Guerra Arquitetos and Douglas Vicentini limit themselves to a short material list and a few strong moves, and they repeat them consistently from the street gate to the bedroom headboard. That consistency, more than any single gesture, is what makes the renovation convincing.

Mooca House by André Guerra Arquitetos and Douglas Vicentini (project coordination), with landscaping by Eiji Taninaka Paisajista. São Paulo, Brazil. 400 m². Completed 2024. Photography by Manuel Sá.

About the Studio

Douglas Vicentini

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