CODA Arquitetura Reworks a 65 m² Brasília Apartment Around a Tiled Island and Its Bare Concrete Frame

Caju Apartment is a 65 m² interior in Asa Sul, the residential wing of Brasília's modernist plan, completed in 2025 by CODA Arquitetura. The lead architects were Pedro Grilo, Julia Coutinho and Carolina Piana. The original brief came from a client setting up her first home. She wanted a social area generous enough for occasional guests, family and friends. Before she could settle in, she relocated. She then rented the flat to one of the firm's own architects, who now lives there with her partner, also an architect.

That second life is what interests us. An apartment designed for one person's idea of hosting is now being tested daily by two designers who know exactly why every decision was made. The project holds up because its strongest moves are structural rather than stylistic. It uses a single island as the anchor of the plan and keeps the building's concrete skeleton on view. A short palette of plywood, oak, white mosaic tile and herringbone parquet does the rest. None of this depends on whose taste is in residence.

One Room Instead of Three

The defining spatial gesture is subtraction. Kitchen, dining and living now read as one continuous room, held together by the herringbone parquet that runs uninterrupted from the cooking zone to the sofa. In a flat this size, removing partitions is the obvious move. The useful question is what replaces them as an organizing device. Here, the answer is furniture-scaled architecture rather than walls.

Look across the counter toward the frosted windows and you can see the hierarchy at work. The island sits in the foreground, the concrete beam frames the middle distance, and the living area settles at the back. Each layer is distinct in material, so the room never collapses into a single undifferentiated volume.

An Island That Behaves Like a Sculpture

The kitchen island is the project's centerpiece, and CODA treats it as an object rather than a cabinet. Its body is wrapped in small white mosaic tile, its corners are curved, and a timber table extension sweeps off one end. The tile is a smart choice here. It handles water and wear like a backsplash, but at this scale and with that curvature, it reads almost as a piece of ceramic.

A round steel extractor hood hangs above it, a deliberately industrial counterpoint to the soft geometry below. At the sink, a stone countertop and a black gooseneck tap keep the working surface plain. The detailing is restrained enough that the potted herbs on the counter end up being the most decorative thing in view.

Plywood, Oak and a Concrete Pedestal

Behind the island, a full wall of plywood cabinetry holds the storage and keeps the appliances quiet. Plywood is an unsentimental material, and using it at this scale reads as a statement of intent: honest grain, visible edges, no pretense of solid hardwood. The joinery, by KL Marcenaria, gives the kitchen its warmth without tipping into rustic.

The oval oak dining table rests on a concrete pedestal, which links the furniture directly to the building's exposed structure. It is a small detail, but it shows the logic of the whole flat. The architects keep pairing a warm, worked material with a raw, cast one. Afternoon sun across the plywood wall shows how much that pairing depends on daylight to come alive.

Letting the Concrete Frame Speak

Rather than plaster over the structure, CODA exposes the board-formed columns and beams. That is a meaningful choice in Brasília, a city whose identity is bound up with raw concrete modernism. Inside a modest apartment, the move scales that heritage down to something personal. You can read the formwork grain on a column just above a ball clock and a floating concrete shelf.

The beams also do real spatial work. Running overhead along the hallway toward the island, they mark the transitions that the missing walls no longer define. In a renovation like this, the structure becomes the most honest kind of zoning available.

Filtered Light in the Living Room

Brasília's sun is strong. The living room answers it with sheer roller blinds and, at one tall window, a perforated white screen. Both soften the light without blocking the view. A concrete ledge beneath the window doubles as a planter shelf, turning the sill into a strip of greenery.

The result is a room that feels lit rather than exposed. The tan sofa, the blue rug and the terracotta planters are all ordinary choices, but the diffused daylight gives them a calm consistency that photographs and lives well.

Low Shelves and Small Objects

The media wall is handled with a low concrete shelf beneath a wall-mounted screen. It keeps the television from dominating and lets the floor plane read as continuous. Around it, the furniture stays light and movable: a round teak side table, a leather sling chair, a brushed metal dome lamp.

This is where the apartment's current occupants become visible. The books, dried lavender and stacked objects suggest a home that is actually used, not staged. Seen from the armchair back toward the tiled island and plywood wall, the living corner and the kitchen reveal a shared material vocabulary.

Thresholds and Corners

In a compact plan, the doorways matter as much as the rooms. A black woven wall hanging marks the passage from the hallway, adding texture where a blank wall would have flattened the approach. A glass-front wooden cabinet with trailing ivy sits beside another threshold, a display piece placed exactly where people pass.

A round marble-top table and a low wooden bench form a reading nook near the window. It is a reminder that a 65 m² apartment can still offer more than one place to sit, if the designers think in corners rather than rooms.

A Workspace Built into the Wall

The private side of the flat holds its most telling piece of furniture: a plywood desk cantilevered from the wall, with round finger-pull drawers and no legs. It occupies almost no floor area and leaves the room free for circulation, which is exactly what a workspace needs in a small home shared by two architects.

Beside it, a board-marked concrete strip carries a timber-framed mirror, and a red chair supplies the only strong color in the space. White wardrobes keep storage flush and quiet. The concrete column remains exposed here too, carrying the structural honesty of the social area into the private rooms.

Plans and Drawings

The two plans make the strategy explicit. The original layout was a narrow rectangle carved into a separate kitchen, laundry, living room, hallway, two bedrooms and a single bathroom. The renovated plan opens the living room and kitchen into one space organized around the island, keeps one bedroom, introduces a home office and adds a second bathroom.

Read side by side, the drawings show a reallocation rather than an expansion. Corridor and partition area are converted into shared space and service, and the program shifts from a conventional two-bedroom unit toward one that suits how people actually live and work at home now.

Why This Project Matters

Caju Apartment shows that an interior designed for one occupant can transfer cleanly to another when its decisions are rooted in plan and structure rather than personal styling. The island, the exposed frame, the plywood wall and the cantilevered desk would make sense for almost anyone. That durability is rare in residential interiors, which are often tailored so closely to a single client that they age as soon as that client leaves.

It also offers a useful model for Brasília's large stock of mid-century apartments. Rather than disguising the concrete that defines the city, CODA lets it sit beside softer, everyday materials. Converting a second bedroom into a workspace reflects a broader shift in how small urban homes are used. We think that combination of restraint and adaptability is the real lesson here.

Caju Apartment by CODA Arquitetura (lead architects Pedro Grilo, Julia Coutinho and Carolina Piana), Asa Sul, Brasília, Brazil. Area: 65 m². Completed: 2025. Photography: Júlia Tótoli.

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