Novais Arquitetura Brings the Ceará Backlands into a 1970s Seafront Apartment in Fortaleza

Seafront apartments in Brazilian coastal cities tend to follow a familiar script: white surfaces, glass, and a view that does most of the work. Novais Arquitetura, led by Marcus Novais and Lucas Novais, takes a different line with Veredas Apartment, a 203 m² renovation inside the Dom Pedro I Building, a 1970s block on Avenida Beira-Mar in Fortaleza. The owner's brief was short and unusually poetic. He wanted a sertão facing the sea, a piece of the Ceará backlands set against the Atlantic.

That brief is what makes the project worth your attention. The client, businessman and triathlete Cyro Thomaz, had lived in a countryside house surrounded by fruit trees before moving to the coast with pastry chef Lia Quinderé, one of their sons, and their dog Tobias. Instead of trading one landscape for another, the architects gutted the original layout and rebuilt the interior around exposed concrete, wood, weathering steel, and earthy color. They then filled it with signed Brazilian design and work by local artists and artisans. The result reads less like a styled apartment and more like a family's history arranged into rooms.

A Backland Built from Objects

The living room carries the concept most directly. An ochre wall, open shelves of clay figures, and terracotta pieces lined up under a raw concrete ceiling give the space the palette of dry earth. Sheer curtains soften the coastal light so that it lands on these surfaces gently; they do not compete with them.

Look at how the shelving works. Pipe-framed timber shelves hold woven hangings, ceramics, and a bright mushroom lamp, so the collection becomes the architecture of the room. This is a risky move, because shelves full of craft objects can quickly turn into clutter. Here the restrained base materials keep it under control, and the objects read as a curated record of the interior of Ceará.

Timber, Raw Concrete and the Ornamental Door

A vertical timber slat wall, a long wooden bench, and dried branches make up one of the apartment's most composed corners. A large abstract landscape painting hangs over it, a clear reminder that the backlands here are evoked rather than copied.

The pivot door with its painted ornamental motif is the detail we keep returning to. It points toward vernacular decoration without falling into pastiche, and it sits next to a concrete pillar left visibly marked, facing a hazy sea view. That pairing of a handmade threshold, an exposed structural element, and the ocean sums up the whole project in one frame. The existing 1970s building is not hidden; it becomes part of the material story.

A Working Kitchen at the Center

With a pastry chef in the household, the kitchen was never going to be a showpiece tucked behind a wall. The renovation fully merges kitchen and living area, opening the plan toward the ocean. A slatted timber ceiling runs across the cooking zone and gives it a lower, warmer register than the concrete-ceilinged living room.

The material choices here are practical as well as expressive. Hexagonal floor tile, a dark stone counter, a pale blue brick wall, and a rusted metal door with a round window give the galley a workshop character. Herbs on the windowsill and a hanging pothos over the breakfast bar keep it grounded in daily use, which is the right instinct for a kitchen that people actually cook in.

Dining Like a Neighborhood Café

The dining area pairs green upholstered chairs with woven and wire pendants, and a yellow mosaic artwork hangs above a slatted sideboard. It is relaxed rather than formal, and it flows straight into the kitchen island behind it.

The most charming gesture is the café vocabulary. A black letter board listing daily offers and a chalkboard menu are mounted directly on rough concrete columns, turning structure into signage. It is a small joke about the owner's profession, but it also says something about how the family wants to live: around a counter, with food as the social glue of the house.

Suites Shaped by a Triathlete's Routine

The new plan holds three suites, and the couple's walk-in closet was enlarged. What stands out is how personal the bedrooms remain. A red racing bicycle sits in the corner beneath a large floral painting and appears again beside a pink-tiled shower. It is less a decorative prop than evidence of the seaside routine that motivated the move in the first place.

Elsewhere the suites stay calm. A wall of handmade terracotta tiles behind a suede armchair, a steel shelf of red books fixed to a concrete column, and a teal quilt under filtered daylight give each room a distinct mood. The common thread is texture, not a uniform style, and that keeps the private rooms from feeling like hotel copies of one another.

Thresholds, Basins and Small Devotions

The bathrooms keep the same material discipline at a smaller scale. A stone wall-hung basin set against hexagonal flower-pattern tile catches striped afternoon sun, while a granite vanity with amber glass bottles sits beneath half-closed wooden blinds. In both cases the light filtered through the slats ends up doing much of the decorating.

The narrow entry nook, with its crocheted-edge console, devotional figurines, and framed prints, may be the most honest space in the apartment. It is the kind of corner most designers would edit out. Leaving it in signals that the architects saw the residents' attachments as part of the brief, not something to style away.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan and axonometric show how firmly the renovation reorganized the 1970s layout. Suites with ensuite bathrooms line one side, while the living, dining, and open kitchen combine into a single sequence oriented toward the sea. The sections are drawn with furniture, plants, and hanging shelves included, which tells you the architects treat furnishing as part of the architecture rather than a later layer.

Why This Project Matters

Veredas Apartment demonstrates that regional identity in an interior does not have to come from a mood board of rustic clichés. Novais Arquitetura builds it from a precise mix of raw structure, honest materials, and objects with real local provenance. The sertão appears as a palette, a set of crafts, and a way of gathering around food, not as a theme.

It also offers a useful model for renovating Brazil's aging seafront towers. Instead of erasing the 1970s concrete frame, the project lays it bare and lets it carry menus, shelves, and marks of time. For architects working on dense coastal stock, that is the lesson: the most convincing interiors start with who lives there and what they left behind.

Veredas Apartment by Novais Arquitetura (Marcus Novais and Lucas Novais), Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil. Area: 203 m². Completed: 2025. Photography: Denilson Machado – MCA Estúdio.

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