Huma Arquitetura Turns a Botafogo Penthouse into a Striped, Tiled Home for a Rio Theater Director

Penthouses in dense Rio neighborhoods usually sell the view first and the interior second. Huma Arquitetura, led by Hugo Viana and Mayla Barreto, reversed that order for the Humaitá Penthouse, a 180 m² apartment in Botafogo completed in 2025. The client is a young actress and theater director, and the brief was simple: a home that feels like a house and holds up to the rhythm of a working life in the performing arts.

What makes the project worth your attention is how much work a single motif is asked to do. The client requested stripes as a reference, and the studio adopted them as the main compositional device. The stripes appear as tile bands, painted wall splits and checkered borders, used carefully enough that the apartment never tips into pattern overload. The result reads less like a decorated flat and more like a set designed by someone who knows exactly where the audience will look.

The Arch as Proscenium

The dining area sits behind an arch trimmed in a brown and cream checkered border, and it is hard not to read it as a stage frame. A round wood table, blue spindle chairs and a paper globe pendant fill the opening, and the composition holds from almost every angle you approach it.

For a client who spends her working life arranging bodies within frames, this is a smart gesture. The arch defines the room without a door or wall, keeping the plan open while giving the most social part of the home its own sense of occasion.

Checkered Borders and the Discipline of Pattern

Look closely and the checkered band turns out to be a precise line of terracotta and cream tile, running beneath oak cabinetry and around the arch opening. It works like piping on a garment: thin, continuous and responsible for most of the visual structure.

The restraint matters. Huma keeps these bands narrow and lets plain surfaces do most of the talking around them. The tile makers credited on the project, Portobello, Ladrilhos Petrópolis and Strufaldi, point to a palette built from Brazilian ceramic and cement tile traditions, and the design treats that material as the lead rather than a backdrop.

A Kitchen Built from Warm Materials

The galley kitchen pairs oak cabinetry and open shelving with a pink stone countertop and a terracotta floor. A striped tile base anchors the lower cabinets, and white square tile keeps the backsplash calm enough for daily use.

Open shelves are a commitment; they only work when the owner's things are worth seeing. Here, blue mugs, a basil plant and a glass carafe become part of the composition, and the kitchen feels lived in rather than staged. That is the house-like quality the brief asked for, delivered through clutter that has been planned for.

The Blue Tiled Platform

The strongest single object in the apartment is a blue tiled bench that runs from the entry into the living area. It acts as planter, seat and display shelf, holding monstera pots, vinyl records and a record player along its length.

Built-in furniture like this is how small urban apartments gain the generosity of larger homes. One continuous tiled element replaces several freestanding pieces, organizes the threshold and brings planting indoors, all in a single surface that matches the pale blue of the doors and steel-framed glazing.

Living Room as Listening Room

An orange velvet sofa sits on a patterned rug beside the platform, with a red and cream striped wall band behind it. The turntable and records on the tiled ledge set the tone: this is a room arranged for listening and lingering, not for showing off a television.

The motion-blur shot of a barefoot figure crossing the terracotta floor captures the intent better than any static view. The surfaces are warm, tactile and forgiving, and the apartment is clearly designed to be walked through without shoes.

A Desk in the Afternoon Light

A wooden writing desk sits at the end of the hallway, framed by three woven wall discs and a pale blue steel-framed glass door. For a theater director, this is probably where scripts get marked up and rehearsal notes get written.

Placing the desk in a circulation zone instead of a closed study is a quiet but useful decision. It borrows daylight from the terrace side, keeps work visible within domestic life and saves floor area for rooms that need enclosure.

Bedrooms with Split Walls and Soft Color

In the bedrooms, the stripe becomes a painted horizon. A wall split between cream and blush pink lowers the visual ceiling and makes the room feel more sheltering, while an arched pale blue window door opens onto the terrace and repeats the arch from the dining area.

A second room uses diamond-patterned wallpaper, an oval mirror and globe sconces. It is the busiest surface in the project, and its placement in a private room rather than a shared space shows the studio deciding exactly where pattern can be loud.

Plans and Drawings

The demolition and new construction plans show how much of the existing layout was reworked, with walls removed in red and new elements drawn in blue. This is an interior renovation inside an existing building, so the drawings are the clearest record of the design effort behind the finishes.

The furnished plan shows the result: bedrooms and bathrooms grouped together, a social core of dining, kitchen and living space, and a planted terrace along the top edge. The arch and the tiled platform sit right at the hinges between these zones, which explains why they carry so much weight in the photographs.

Why This Project Matters

Plenty of residential interiors treat a client's taste as a mood board to be translated into furniture. Huma treated one request, stripes, as a design rule and then disciplined it across tile, paint and built-in elements. That approach produces coherence without sameness, and it gives you a useful model for working with clients who come in with strong references.

The project also makes a case for Brazilian ceramic craft as a contemporary interior language rather than a nostalgic one. Terracotta, cement tile and glazed blue surfaces do structural work in the composition, defining thresholds and holding furniture. In a dense neighborhood like Botafogo, that is how a 180 m² penthouse earns its claim to feel like a house.

Humaitá Penthouse by Huma Arquitetura (lead architects Hugo Viana and Mayla Barreto), Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Area: 180 m². Completed: 2025. Photography: Leila Viegas.

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