Paulo Tripoloni Converts a Sealed São Paulo Commercial Building into a Three-Storey House Built Around a Courtyard

Most residential conversions in São Paulo start with a building that was never meant for living. JT House, by Atelier de Arquitetura Paulo Tripoloni, begins with exactly that kind of property: a former commercial space with compartmentalized rooms and almost no connection to the outdoors. The finished home is 145 m², stacked over three storeys on a narrow urban lot, and completed in 2025.

What interests us is less the change of use than how the architect reverses the logic of the original building. A space that once faced inward and stayed shut now organizes itself around a planted courtyard, folding glass doors and a kitchen that sits at the heart of the ground floor. The palette is frank: exposed concrete, glass block, concrete block lattice, steel mesh. Strong color and plenty of plants keep that toughness domestic.

A Narrow Front on a Dense Street

From the street, JT House reads as a slim three-storey volume with black-framed windows, a steel carport canopy and bougainvillea spilling over the front. It does not pretend to be a villa. The facade accepts its tight plot and its commercial past, and it saves its generosity for the inside.

Upstairs, concrete block screen walls filter daylight onto a landing finished with a black pivot door and a yellow wall. The block lattice does two jobs at once: it ventilates and lights the circulation, and it gives the occupants privacy from close neighbors. On a lot this compressed, that double duty is the right call.

The Courtyard as the Real Living Room

The timber-decked courtyard is the clearest sign that the brief was rewritten. A slatted hammock, a dining table, banana leaves and palms fill an outdoor room set against glass block and a concrete block screen. In a building that once had almost no relationship with the outside, this space now anchors daily life.

The planting does not stop at the threshold. A bathroom nook with a timber shelf, a blue basin, a planted bench and a staghorn fern sits in filtered daylight, which shows that the architect treats greenery as part of the architecture, not as decoration added later.

Thresholds That Disappear

Folding and sliding glass walls open the dining area and kitchen fully to the courtyard. When the doors are pulled back, the ground floor becomes one continuous space running from the walnut dining table out to the deck. This is the single most important move in the project, and the photographs show why: daylight and air now reach deep into a plan that used to be cut into small, closed rooms.

The idea is simple enough to work in any dense neighborhood. Instead of chasing views across the street, the house builds its own view at the back and opens toward it.

The Kitchen Takes the Center

A long island with a gas cooktop and mint stools sits squarely on the main axis of the ground floor, so cooking happens in full view of the courtyard and the dining table. The kitchen is the social center of the house, and the layout admits it openly.

Look closer and the detailing turns playful. Navy wall cabinets hang over an open shelf of books and trailing plants, a hexagonal tile backsplash sits behind a red stand mixer, and a galley run of timber cabinets ends at a window of concrete block lattice under exposed black ductwork. Services are left visible, and that honesty suits a building that does not hide its origins.

A Concrete Stair as Spine

The exposed concrete stair is the sculptural backbone of the project. Its cantilevered treads rise beside the kitchen island, float above a timber sideboard and climb against a mustard yellow wall, with a mesh guard taking the place of a solid balustrade. The mesh keeps the stair light and lets views pass through, which matters in a narrow plan where every solid surface would close the space down.

Seen from the dining area, the stair works almost like furniture. It frames the round table and the navy kitchen, and it pulls the eye upward through the section. Here vertical circulation becomes a spatial event instead of a service core pushed into a corner.

Color Doing Structural Work

A green locker-style media cabinet, mint wire stools, a striped rug and a fiddle-leaf fig give the living area its character. Against a concrete column and a glass block window wall, these saturated pieces separate zones without adding walls. Color stands in for partitions here, and in an open plan this small, that is a sharp tactic.

The glass block wall deserves attention too. It brings in diffused light while blurring the outside world, and it fits the house's broader strategy of letting light in without giving up privacy.

Bare Structure, Lived-In Corners

Exposed concrete beams and board-marked ceilings run through the living room and the work areas. In the studio corner, a drafting table and a blue rolling tool chest sit under the beams. A white desk with dual monitors faces a window. The house is clearly built for working as well as living, and the raw ceilings give both uses a shared, workshop-like texture.

We like that the structure is left alone. Plastering over it would have erased the clearest physical trace of the building's previous life.

Private Rooms Behind Mesh

The bedrooms pick up the house's language of screens. Steel mesh covers the windows, framing nearby towers in one room and tree canopy in another. The mesh softens how close the city is without shutting it out, a sensible answer for upper floors in a vertical neighborhood.

The bathroom is calmer: a floating oak vanity, a marble countertop and a glass shower screen. The tone shifts as you climb, from the social, colorful ground floor to quieter private spaces above.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings confirm what the photographs suggest. The floor plans show a long, narrow footprint organized from ground floor to roof, with the garden at the rear. The longitudinal sections place the staircase at the center of the vertical organization, with rooftop water tanks and palms marking the top of the building. The elevations and cross sections show the stacked massing and how tightly the house sits on its lot.

Why This Project Matters

São Paulo has no shortage of underused commercial buildings on narrow lots, and JT House shows a convincing way to bring them back as homes. The approach is not about demolition or spectacle. It reorganizes the interior around light, air and a piece of outdoor space, then lets robust, inexpensive materials such as concrete block, glass block and steel mesh do the environmental work.

The broader lesson is about priorities. Tripoloni puts the kitchen, the courtyard and the stair at the center and lets everything else fall into place around them. For architects working with tight urban plots, that hierarchy is worth studying: decide what the house is for, then open the building up to serve it.

JT House by Atelier de Arquitetura Paulo Tripoloni, São Paulo, Brazil. Area: 145 m². Completed: 2025. Photography by João Paulo Soares de Oliveira.

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.