Marcio Kogan Rotates the Brazilian Veranda Ninety Degrees to Organize a São Paulo Family House

Most house briefs list rooms. The family behind House 6 asked for something harder to draw: a covered outdoor space they would actually use every day, one that would carry the social life of the house. Marcio Kogan, working with Diana Radomysler, answered with a veranda. It is not the shaded strip along a façade that Brazilian houses have used since colonial times. It is a full room, open to the garden, that serves as living room, TV room and outdoor extension of the kitchen.

The interesting move is geometric. Completed in 2010 on an 890 m² São Paulo lot, the 995 m² house stacks two volumes at one end and crosses them perpendicularly. The veranda therefore sits at a right angle to the living room. It does not run along it. The two social spaces meet at a pivot rather than side by side, and that one rotation does more work than any material choice in the project. The veranda stops being a margin. It becomes the hinge the rest of the plan turns on.

A Veranda That Pivots Instead of Fronting

The traditional Brazilian veranda is a buffer. It is a strip of shade, timber posts and clay tiles between the house and the yard. Kogan keeps its purpose and drops its form. The wicker and teak armchairs, the outdoor kitchen bar and the long dining table sit under a concrete slab carried on round columns. A green-tiled pool runs past at arm's length. The space has no front wall and no back wall. Its edges are the slab above and the water beside it.

Because the veranda runs perpendicular to the interior living room, you never read it as a porch tacked onto a house. From inside, it opens like a second room turned toward the garden. From the lawn, it reads as the base the whole building stands on. The rear views show this most clearly: one column, one slab and a terrace full of chairs, with the house above.

Pilotis as the New Clay Tile

Modern pilotis and flat slabs replace the wooden pillars and tiled roofs of the colonial veranda. That substitution is the conceptual core of the house, and it lands. The upper volume is a concrete box that seems to hover above the stone garden wall. Its slender columns are thin enough that, at dusk, the lit pavilion below looks like it carries no load at all.

The cantilever is restrained. There is no structural drama for its own sake. The overhang is as deep as the shade requires and stops there. This is Kogan's familiar language of horizontal bands and precise edges, but here the language has a job. Each slab exists to make the outdoor room below inhabitable in São Paulo's heat and rain.

A Timber Skin That Opens and Closes

Above the concrete, the bedroom floors wear vertical timber slats and perforated wooden shutters. Two daytime shots compare the shutters folded open and closed, and the difference is large. With the shutters open, the upper level becomes a row of framed openings. Closed, it becomes a continuous wooden screen that tells you nothing about the rooms behind it.

At night the screen inverts and glows from within, a lantern held up over the veranda. A sedum roof below the upper volume softens the view from the bedrooms and from the higher levels. The figure seated on the concrete ledge gives a sense of scale that the drawings alone do not.

The Pool as the Ground Line

The long green-tiled pool does more than provide a place to swim. It works as the house's datum. The lap pool runs the full length of the raised volume, so the water mirrors the slab above and lengthens the veranda visually without adding square metres.

The aerial view shows how blunt the edge is. A pale stone coping divides lawn from mosaic, with tree shadows crossing both. The house has no decorative transition between garden and water, and that reduction suits a project built around the idea that inside and outside should feel continuous.

Stone, Timber and the Pocket Courtyards

The concrete and the veranda carry the headline, but the courtyards give the house its texture. Rough, dry-laid stone walls sit against tall timber slat panels, and the raking sun turns that pairing into the most tactile surface on the site. A paved passage between stone and dark timber leads to a small planted court tucked under the cantilevered slab.

Each pocket courtyard holds a multi-stemmed tree and a bed of grasses, and each is framed so the living spaces borrow it as a view. Renata Tilli's landscape is sparse here, which is right. A single tree lit at twilight beside the open pavilion does more than a garden full of plants would.

Social Rooms That Behave Like Verandas

Indoors, the logic carries through. The living and dining areas, with interiors by Radomysler and Mariana Simas, are framed by stone walls and glass, so the interior social rooms read as enclosed versions of the veranda. Board-formed concrete walls, a rust-red tufted sectional and a long timber table under clustered black pendants keep the palette warm against the grey structure.

The kitchen is the clearest link between inside and outside. Its slatted timber cabinets echo the façade, and the brief made the veranda a direct extension of it. Elsewhere, perforated screen walls scatter dotted light across a rug and a low blue sofa, a quieter version of the shutters on the upper floors.

The Private Floors Upstairs

The upper levels shift into a more interior mood. Floating concrete stair treads rise beside a glass balustrade and a timber bookcase, and a long corridor of built-in shelving and louvered windows runs the length of the bedroom bar. The light here is filtered, patterned and slow. It is the deliberate opposite of the open ground floor.

In the bedrooms, sheer curtains backlit by the sun turn the timber skin into a soft glow. The private floors make the veranda below look more generous by comparison. The more enclosed the bedrooms feel, the more the open ground floor reads as the family's shared room.

Plans and Drawings

The plans confirm the three-storey stacking. The ground floor holds a central block of living and dining spaces, the pool strip and a gym wing. The first floor lines up four bedrooms with bathrooms plus a larger suite. The second floor pulls back to a small rooftop living pavilion surrounded by a terrace. Circular tree outlines appear on every level, a reminder that the canopy belongs to the design.

The section is the most useful drawing. The upper volume sits on slim columns above the water, and a separate low outbuilding sits at the edge of the site. Read together, the drawings show a house that steps upward and inward, with the open ground floor as its widest and most public layer.

Why This Project Matters

House 6 shows how to reinterpret a regional type without turning it into nostalgia. Kogan does not quote the colonial veranda with timber posts or clay tiles. He takes its function, a shaded room between inside and outside, and rebuilds it with pilotis and slabs. Then he rotates it so it becomes the organizing element of the plan. The result is recognisably Brazilian without leaning on a single vernacular detail.

It is also a reminder that a client's single, specific request can be a better design driver than a long program. One sentence about wanting to live outdoors under cover produced the section, the structure and the plan. For anyone designing in a warm climate, the lesson is direct: treat the outdoor room as the main room, and let the enclosed rooms arrange themselves around it.

House 6 by Marcio Kogan (studio mk27) with Diana Radomysler, São Paulo, Brazil. Built area: 995 m². Completed: 2010. Photography: Pedro Kok and Rômulo Fialdini.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.