Julia Peres.Co Arquitetura Turns a São Paulo Apartment's Flaws into a Light-Driven Interior

Most renovation projects begin with a damage report: cracks in the plaster, poorly routed conduit, brick that was never meant to be seen. CB's Apartment, designed by Julia Peres.Co Arquitetura in São Paulo, starts from the same place but arrives somewhere far more interesting. Rather than concealing the building's construction pathologies behind fresh drywall, architect Julia Peres reframes them as the raw material of the design itself. Exposed painted brick, visible conduit runs, and a deliberately weathered surface language give the 136-square-meter flat a layered honesty that most interiors actively suppress.

What makes the project genuinely compelling is its treatment of translucency as a spatial tool. Almost every room boundary in the apartment is mediated by frosted or reeded glass set in white metal frames, turning walls into membranes that shift character as daylight moves across the floor plate. The result is a home that reads differently at noon than it does at dusk, where the relationship between matter, light, and shadow is not a tagline but a lived condition.

The Curtain Wall as Interior Device

The living room occupies a curved window wall that wraps the apartment's primary facade, and its defining feature is a continuous run of floor-to-ceiling sheer curtains. These are not decorative: they function as a diffusion layer that softens São Paulo's often harsh direct sun into a uniform, ambient glow. Mid-century furniture sits on a pale resin floor that bounces this softened light upward, making the room feel far larger than its footprint.

Figures caught in motion through the space reveal how the curtains also introduce a cinematic quality. Silhouettes appear and dissolve against the backlit fabric, giving the room an almost theatrical depth. It is a simple move, fabric stretched on a rail, but the spatial payoff is significant.

Glass Partitions and the Dissolution of Walls

The corridor that organizes the apartment's private zones is lined with translucent glazed partitions in white frames. Reeded glass panels obscure detail while transmitting light and movement, so the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom all register as presences beyond the wall rather than sealed-off rooms. The effect is closest to shoji screens, though the material palette is resolutely industrial: extruded metal profiles, machine-rolled glass, exposed fixings.

A close-up of one reeded panel reveals the subtle optical distortion it produces. Objects on the far side compress and stretch as you shift your viewing angle, which means the partition is never static. It behaves more like a kinetic surface than a fixed boundary, changing its visual texture as you walk past.

Brick, Conduit, and the Aesthetics of Imperfection

Peres makes a deliberate decision to leave several brick walls painted white but otherwise unfinished, their mortar joints and surface irregularities fully legible. Exposed conduit runs alongside these walls without apology. In one hallway, a stainless steel handrail traces a path toward a black-framed window, and the brick surface behind it reads almost like a gallery backdrop for the metalwork.

The key move here is treating these so-called pathologies as texture rather than defect. The frosted glass partition that abuts a painted brick wall with visible wiring creates a tension between the precise and the rough, the controlled and the contingent. That tension is what gives the apartment its character. Without it, you would have just another clean white interior.

Thresholds in Terrazzo and Metal

Terrazzo appears at critical transition points throughout the apartment, most dramatically in the flooring detail where blue and white aggregate meets a dark metal threshold strip. The material does double duty: it marks the boundary between zones and introduces a granular, geological texture that contrasts with the smooth resin flooring elsewhere. On the terrace, a black terrazzo wall panel anchors the planted zone against the city skyline, creating continuity between interior and exterior palettes.

The metalwork throughout the project operates similarly, as planes of interruption that simultaneously connect. Dark steel thresholds, white aluminum frames, and brass bathroom fixtures form a coherent family of linear elements that stitch the apartment together across its varied surfaces.

Private Rooms Behind Frosted Glass

The bedroom and bathroom are both accessed through white-framed sliding doors with frosted glass panels, a detail that allows these rooms to borrow light from the corridor and living spaces while maintaining privacy. Through the bedroom doorway, a timber pallet bed with white bedding sits in a quiet, pared-back enclosure. The frosted glass reduces the view to shapes and tones, which gives even casual glimpses a composed quality.

The bathroom reveals itself incrementally. Olive-green tiles and brass fixtures emerge as the sliding door opens, and concealed strip lighting washes the surfaces from below. It is a room designed to be discovered rather than displayed, and the sliding threshold makes that discovery a conscious, physical act.

Terrace as Extension

The planted terrace is not an afterthought. Potted plants in a gravel bed are visible through open glass doors from the seating area, and the transition from interior to exterior is handled with deliberate ease: leather furniture faces the glazed opening as if the terrace were a second living room. The gravel, pots, and planting are composed with the same precision as the interior furnishings, extending the design logic outdoors.

From the interior, the terrace also functions as a light well. Daylight reflects off the gravel and greenery before entering the living spaces, warming the palette and softening contrasts. It is the kind of passive environmental strategy that works because it is embedded in the architecture rather than bolted on.

The Green Room

A glimpse through a doorway into the bathroom reveals dark green tile walls, a brass faucet, and concealed strip lighting that transforms this compact room into the most chromatically intense space in the apartment. Against the predominantly white and pale palette of the rest of the home, this room operates as a deliberate counterpoint. The green tiles absorb light rather than reflecting it, making the bathroom feel both intimate and grounded.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan confirms the apartment's L-shaped organization, with the living area anchored to the curved facade and the private rooms arranged along a corridor that terminates at the planted terrace. The section drawing reveals how the bathroom, bedroom, and living spaces stack in a compact cross-section, with the terrace operating as a natural terminus and light source. An elevation drawing of the three window bays shows the proportional logic of the facade, while the axonometric explodes the interior into a legible diagram, making clear how the tiled courtyard and planted terrace serve as the organizational hinge around which every room pivots.

Why This Project Matters

CB's Apartment is a quiet rebuke to the renovation industry's reflex of covering everything up. Julia Peres demonstrates that the things typically hidden, rough brick, surface conduit, irregular mortar joints, can be folded into a coherent aesthetic language when the designer is willing to look at them honestly. The project does not romanticize decay or fetishize rawness; it simply refuses to treat imperfection as failure.

More broadly, the apartment makes a case for translucency as a spatial strategy in compact urban homes. In 136 square meters, hard walls create hard limits. By replacing many of those walls with frosted and reeded glass in metal frames, Peres builds an interior where light, movement, and presence travel freely between rooms without sacrificing privacy. It is a replicable idea, technically modest and materially accessible, which makes it more valuable than a one-off spectacle.

CB's Apartment by Julia Peres.Co Arquitetura. São Paulo, Brazil. 136 m². Completed 2026. Photography by Estúdio Peixes.

About the Studio

Julia Peres.Co Arquitetura

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