ETEH Reworks the Shared Spaces of São Domingos School in Brazil Around Timber, Color and Hanging Plants

Most school renovations stop at the classroom door. At São Domingos School in Brazil, ETEH worked on the rooms in between: an arrival hall, a refectory, a library and a set of long circulation walls, 436 m² in total, completed in 2018. The school's brief was clear. It wanted environments that would encourage new ways of teaching, and it treated the spaces where students wait, eat and read as part of that teaching.

The project is interesting because of its method more than its square footage. ETEH does not add new volumes. It works almost entirely through interior elevations: timber paneling, built-in joinery, a strict palette of yellow and blue, and plants hung from the ceiling. The drawing set reads like a furniture catalogue for an entire building, and that is the point. The architecture here is the wall, the bench and the shelf.

An Arrival Hall That Behaves Like a Living Room

The waiting area is the only space we see photographed, and it carries the whole argument. Curved timber benches replace the usual row of chairs, pothos plants trail down from above, and a circular lattice panel in the ceiling filters daylight into patches on the grey floor. The room reads as domestic, a place where you could sit for an hour rather than a corridor you pass through.

The plan shows how this is organized. Curved seating pieces and yellow round tables are set around a central elevator core, so a piece of fixed infrastructure becomes the anchor of a social room instead of an obstacle. The reception elevation completes the picture: timber counters, yellow panels and hanging plants line the wall right up to the elevator door, which means the building's services are absorbed into the same visual language as the furniture.

A Refectory Run on a Color Code

The refectory plan mixes square and round tables around a central counter and a serving bar, with a small restroom set into an alcove. That variety matters. Square tables suggest rows and order; round ones suggest conversation. Putting both in one room gives students a choice about how they eat together, which suits a school that wants to loosen its routines.

The sections show that the refectory sits under a gabled roof, which suggests ETEH was working inside an existing building rather than starting new. The designers respond with color rather than structure. A blue column, a blue wall band and yellow-framed windows give a set of fixed points, while timber paneling and a service counter fill the lower register where hands and trays actually touch. Pendant bulbs and trailing plants hang into the roof void, bringing the tall gable down to a human height.

Long Walls Treated as Furniture

The interior elevations are where the project's logic is easiest to read. A long wall gets two yellow-framed windows, a timber base and a blue band; another gets a blue recess deep enough to hold a planter box. Instead of hanging decoration on blank plaster, ETEH builds the wall itself as a sequence of usable parts.

The blue and white wall with horizontal timber slats and a semicircular cutout is the most playful moment in the set. The curve echoes the round lattice in the hall ceiling and the curved benches, so a few simple geometries recur across rooms. You learn the building by repetition, which is a quiet form of wayfinding for younger students.

Doors, Slats and Thresholds

Thresholds get the same attention as the rooms. One elevation frames a wall in blue and layers timber slats, hanging planters, glazed panels and louvered white doors, so the passage between spaces stays partly visible and partly screened. That balance of openness and enclosure suits a school, where supervision and privacy both matter.

Another wall carries two screens with the school's logo above a blue base and a timber cubby shelf. It is a small detail, but it shows how institutional elements such as branding and storage are given a place in the composition rather than being added later. The joinery listed on the project, from Sherlio Marcenaria and Sol e Mar Marcenaria, alongside wood panels from Masisa, points to a scheme that relies heavily on carpentry for exactly these moves.

A Library Built Around One Long Table

The library plan avoids the familiar grid of desks. A single long central table organizes the room, a green planted area brings the hanging-garden theme indoors at floor level, and two computer desks sit to one side. One shared surface encourages group work, which fits the school's interest in changing how teaching happens.

The shelving elevation turns storage into a pattern of hexagonal cells with yellow edges, books scattered through them, beneath a row of green panels. Nearby, a long room carries a timber wall with a mounted television, built-in joinery and a yellow tiered seating nook. The nook is the most important piece of the set: a few steps of seating let a class gather informally around a screen without the front-facing order of a lecture room.

Why This Project Matters

Many schools cannot afford new buildings, but they can afford carpentry, paint and a careful plan. São Domingos shows how far that budget can go when designers treat interior elevations as seriously as facades. ETEH uses a limited kit of timber, two strong colors, plants and a few repeated curves, and it applies that kit consistently enough that a hall, a refectory and a library feel like parts of one environment.

The larger lesson concerns where learning happens. By designing the waiting area, the lunch room and the reading table with as much care as a classroom, the project suggests that a school's informal spaces shape behavior as much as its formal ones. If you want students to sit together, talk and settle in, you give them curved benches, round tables and a nook to climb into. That is a modest architectural claim, and a convincing one.

São Domingos School by ETEH. Location: Brazil. Area: 436 m². Year: 2018. Photography: Camila Santos.

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