Memola Estúdio Builds a Steel-Framed Restaurant in São Paulo That Translates Arab Space into Tile, Screen and Structure

Restaurants that trade on a cultural identity usually reach for the easy fix: a few brass lanterns, a patterned cushion, a carved panel bolted onto an ordinary room. Casa Baruk, completed in 2025 on Rua Mato Grosso in Higienópolis, São Paulo, refuses that shortcut. Memola Estúdio, led by Veronica Molina, was asked by Gustavo and Denise Batistel of the Baruk group to house the group's shift from Arab buffet dining to an à la carte menu with Mediterranean influences. The studio's answer is a new 700 m² steel-framed building that tries to make an Arab experience out of construction rather than decoration.

The interesting part is the research behind it. The team did not import motifs from the Middle East. They looked at how Arab-derived elements already entered Brazilian architecture through the Iberian peninsula: the mashrabiya as it became the colonial rótula and gelosia, the internal courtyard, glazed ceramic tile. Each of these returns here as a working element: a screen that filters heat and views, a double-height hall that behaves like a covered patio, tile that serves as wall finish, floor and bar cladding all at once. It is a smarter brief than most hospitality interiors get, and the building mostly lives up to it.

A Screen Instead of a Sign

The street front makes the argument in one gesture. A perforated ceramic screen fills the upper level, and custom blue-painted iron casings below it alternate clear and textured glass. There is no shopfront branding to speak of; the lattice is the identity. Seen at dusk, the screen glows from within and reads like a lantern set into the block, which is a far more persuasive signal of hospitality than a logo.

The screen is also not working alone. A second window frame sits behind it to improve thermal and acoustic comfort, so the lattice can stay porous while the room stays quiet. This is the mashrabiya doing what it was always meant to do: shading, giving privacy, and keeping glimpses of street and sky. The terracotta tone of the painted steel ties the façade to the stone pavement, so the building sits in the street instead of shouting over it.

A Column-Free Hall Built in Steel

The site originally held two semi-detached houses of no particular character, previously used for commerce. Memola first studied keeping them, testing new openings, level changes and how the plan might fit the existing structural grid. They then demolished the houses and started fresh. We think that was the right call. The steel frame pushes every vertical support to the edges of the site, so the front hall rises double-height without a single column in the middle.

That clear span is what lets the courtyard idea work indoors. Diagonal daylight crosses the patterned floor, drum pendants hang in the tall volume, and the mezzanine looks back down into the room from beneath round skylights. Steel also shortened the build compared with other systems, which matters on a commercial project where every month of construction is a month without covers.

The Bar as Organizer

With no columns to define zones, the central bar takes over the job. It divides the hall into a tall front room and a lower, more intimate area under the mezzanine. Its rounded corners steer circulation around it rather than blocking it. Clad in ceramic with brass trim and topped by a blue iron display cabinet and a timber canopy, it is the densest object in the room, and it earns that weight because it is doing structural work in the plan, not only serving drinks.

The curve matters at the human scale too. Leather-topped stools line its edge, and guests sitting there face both the bottle shelf and the movement of the room. A straight bar would have split the space into front and back; the round one turns it into a loop.

Tile That Does the Work

Ceramic is the project's real language. Green glazed tile runs as a dado across the lower half of the ground-floor walls, with concrete block laid above it between the steel columns. The back wall under the mezzanine is clad entirely in green, and its glossy surface pulls light into the deepest part of the plan. The floor reinterprets Mediterranean courtyard paving: eight terracotta rectangles set around small interlaced green tiles, repeated across the room.

What keeps this from becoming a pattern catalogue is discipline. The whole project follows a strict modular logic covering how the blocks are laid, how they meet the steel, and how the tile layout resolves at edges and corners. Shell-shaped sconces wash the perforated cream block walls with indirect light, so the texture shows without any added ornament. The tile is the decoration because it is also the finish, the joint and the light reflector.

Banquettes, Plants and the Lower Room

The lower dining zone under the mezzanine trades height for intimacy. A caramel leather banquette runs along the walls, terracotta pots with dried stems sit on a green tile ledge, and warm sconces turn the clay surfaces amber at night. Near the front glazing, planting softens the line between the room and the street, and bentwood chairs keep the furniture light against the heavier surfaces.

You can read the project's palette most clearly here: terracotta, deep green, cream, caramel and brass. It is a short list, and the restraint is the point. Every material is repeated rather than introduced once for effect, which is why the room feels coherent rather than themed.

Stairs, Pipes and Service Spaces

The building is honest about its systems. Piping and track lighting run exposed along the ceilings, and the stair climbs past a wall of terracotta tiles stacked vertically rather than horizontally, a small shift that gives the circulation its own rhythm. The upper floors carry the mezzanine's staff and support functions and the second floor's offices and storage, so the stair is a working route as much as a guest one.

The restrooms push the palette one step further. A corridor clad in blue glazed tile leads to a steel-framed frosted door, and inside, concrete trough sinks sit under carved wooden mirrors and blue glass pendants. Copper pipes and a brass tap are left on show. The detailing is careful without becoming precious, and it shows that the material logic held all the way into the back of house.

Plans and Drawings

The plans make the three-level stacking legible: dining rooms and kitchen on the ground floor, staff and support on the mezzanine, offices and storage above with an open terrace. The sections and front elevation show how the perforated screen wraps the upper volume and how the double-height hall cuts through the stack. Together they confirm what the photographs suggest, that the edges of the site carry the structure so the centre can stay open.

Why This Project Matters

Casa Baruk is a useful counterexample to the themed restaurant. Memola Estúdio treated cultural reference as a building problem: how to shade a façade, how to bring daylight into a deep urban lot, how to give a dining room the social focus of a courtyard. The answers draw on Arab precedent as it passed through Iberia into Brazil, so the building reads as local to São Paulo rather than imported into it.

It also shows what clients get when they let architects rebuild instead of redecorate. The Batistels' earlier restaurants sat in contemporary shells with occasional Arab ornament, and by the architects' account they lacked a consistent spatial identity. Here the identity is carried by the steel span, the screen and the tile, which means it will outlast any refresh of the menu or the furniture. For hospitality design in Brazilian cities, that is a model worth copying.

Casa Baruk Restaurant by Memola Estúdio (lead architect Veronica Molina; design team Bianca Sinisgalli, Juliana Jacobovitz, Carol Ribeiro, Natália Cristofoletto, Micaela Kosmalski), Higienópolis, São Paulo, Brazil. Area: 700 m². Completed: 2025. Builder: CYMZ – Construções. Photography by Leila Viegas.

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