GDL Arquitetura Merges Kitchen, Hall and Living Room into One Room in a 60 m² São Paulo Apartment

Sixty square meters is not much room to work with, and most São Paulo apartments of this size spend too much of it on walls. In the Natom Apartment, completed in 2017, GDL Arquitetura, led by Gabriel de Lucca, took the obvious route of taking walls out. What makes the result worth studying is how carefully the studio decided what to keep. The kitchen, entrance hall and living room now form one uninterrupted space. The renovation still marks where cooking ends and living begins, and it does so without a single partition.

The project has no new structure and no dramatic gesture. It is a renovation built from flooring, joinery and a reconsidered bathroom. That modesty is the point. Natom shows how far a small budget of moves can go when each one does two jobs: a floor change that also works as a room boundary, a shelf that also works as a social anchor, a bathroom that also holds a bar. We think it is a useful reference for anyone redesigning a compact flat in a dense city.

One Room Where There Used to Be Three

The living room view toward the kitchen sums up the strategy. With the dividing walls gone, daylight crosses the full depth of the apartment, and the sofa, dining table and kitchen counter read as zones on a single plane. A long oak shelf runs along the wall and ties these zones together visually. It is a cheap, effective way to give an open plan a spine.

The furniture is sparse on purpose. A black stool, an arched floor lamp and a crate of magazines are about all that sits between the dining area and the wall. In a space this size, every object you leave out returns floor area to circulation, and the room feels larger than its plan suggests.

A Kitchen Defined by Its Floor

Pale plank flooring replaced the floor throughout the apartment, with one exception. The kitchen sits on pre-molded hexagonal cement tile, and the seam where cement meets timber is the only boundary the kitchen gets. This detail does real work. It signals a change of use, it puts a durable, washable surface where spills happen, and it leaves the sightlines completely open.

Above the counter, a blue patterned backsplash brings the only strong color into a neutral palette. The architects single out a Brazilian tile by Lurca as a key feature, a small but meaningful nod to local craft in an interior that otherwise leans international. The oak peninsula and wall-mounted counter double as breakfast bar and workspace, so the kitchen behaves like part of the living room.

Furniture Supplies the Warmth

The brief asked for warmth, and in a scheme built from white walls and pale timber, the furniture has to deliver it. Wishbone chairs with woven paper-cord seats and curved oak frames appear at the counter, the table and the bedroom. Repeating one chair type across rooms makes the apartment feel like a single home rather than a sequence of styled corners.

The bedroom photograph, with books stacked on a chair and a Boston terrier asleep on the rug, matters too. It shows a lived-in apartment, and the neutral backdrop absorbs that daily clutter well. Minimalism that tolerates real life is harder to design than minimalism that only works in an empty photograph.

Thresholds, Doors and a Pet Flap

Beyond the open zone, a short hallway carries the same timber floor toward the private rooms. The doors are flush and white, opened by a square cut-out instead of a handle, so they recede into the wall plane. In a narrow corridor, removing projecting hardware is a sensible move that also keeps the visual field quiet.

One door has a screened pet flap cut into it. It is a minor detail, yet it says a lot about the brief. The apartment was designed around the people and the dog who actually live there, and that practical attention shows up in the small decisions as much as the big ones.

A Bathroom Rethought and a Bar Brought In

The architects describe the original bathroom as claustrophobic. Their fix was to reconfigure it to hold a toilet and a home bar, which is an unusual pairing. A floating grey stone vanity with an integrated basin keeps the floor visible beneath it, a familiar trick for making a tight room feel less cramped. A black arched tap provides the one sculptural accent.

The bar program also shows in the built-in white shelving lined with glassware, a cocktail shaker and books. Whatever you think of putting a bar near a toilet, the decision shows a studio willing to reallocate program instead of accepting the room labels it inherited. In small apartments, that willingness often matters more than square meters.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings make the renovation's logic easy to follow. The exploded axonometric lifts the partition walls in red above the floor plan, so you can see exactly which walls were removed and which were kept. The demolition and construction sheet, annotated in Portuguese, pairs the plan with a materials specification table. The bathroom detail sheet works through vanity, shower niche and fixtures in plan, section and elevation, a reminder that most of this project's quality lives at the scale of the detail.

Why This Project Matters

Natom Apartment will not win attention for formal invention, and it does not try to. Its value is in method. GDL Arquitetura treats the open plan as a set of distinctions to manage rather than an excuse to erase everything. A change of floor material, a shared shelf and a repeated chair keep the merged rooms legible, and the kitchen tile meeting the timber floor does more spatial work than any wall could.

For anyone working with existing urban housing stock, which is most of the housing we will occupy in the coming decades, this project is a practical template. Remove what blocks light, keep what organizes use, rethink rooms that no longer serve their occupants, and let materials carry the boundaries. Sixty square meters, handled this way, can feel generous.

Natom Apartment by GDL Arquitetura (Gabriel de Lucca), São Paulo, Brazil. Area: 60 m². Completed: 2017.

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