Perkins&Will Gives a Ten-Unit São Paulo Tower the Garden Life of a House with Casa Arbo

Jardim Guedala is one of the São Paulo neighborhoods where the city still reads as a place of houses: quiet streets, mature trees, and garden walls instead of podiums. Into this setting, Perkins&Will's São Paulo office, with a lead team of Fernando Vidal, Giovanni Campari and Fátima Oliveira, has completed Casa Arbo. It is a single residential tower of 6,070 m² for developer Meta Incorporadora, holding only ten residences. Design studies began in 2019, and the building was finished in 2026.

The interesting part is not the luxury brief. It is the argument that a tower can behave like a house without giving up the benefits of the city. Most high-end towers in São Paulo answer the street with a guarded wall and a gate. Casa Arbo widens the pedestrian zone, pushes vegetation to the property edge and keeps its height closer to the scale of the neighborhood. Then it turns every floor slab into a garden ledge. Whether the tower fully escapes the conventions it critiques is open to debate. The intent is clear, though, and much of it is built.

An Entrance That Gives Something Back to the Sidewalk

The arrival sequence is modest. A timber-slatted canopy shelters glass doors, a concrete wall anchors one side, and broad-leaved planting fills the rest. A ramp with a steel handrail runs along a golden slat wall, which makes accessibility part of the composition rather than an add-on at the back.

The team studied how building, street and pedestrian meet, and you can see the result here. The landscape by Cardim Arquitetura Paisagística extends past the usual plot boundary, so the tower's first gesture is a planted, shaded threshold rather than a security perimeter. In a city where residential towers often turn their backs on the sidewalk, that choice matters more than any facade detail.

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