Sub Estúdio Strips a São Paulo Apartment Back to Its Concrete Frame to Make Room for a Growing Family

The brief behind the Oscar Freire Apartment is one most architects will recognize: a family is expecting a baby and needs more space. They already lived in the building, so moving across the city was off the table. Sub Estúdio completed the renovation in 2017. The studio did not chase square meters through clever storage or folding furniture. It found room in the walls themselves. Most of them came out, and what remains is the building's structure, left raw and put to work.

The interesting move is how little the architects added to replace what they removed. Rough, board-marked concrete columns and beams now define the rooms. Floor finishes take the place of doorways: herringbone parquet gives way to yellow triangle tile where the kitchen begins. Color does the rest of the zoning. A blue wall marks the dining area, and an all-pink bathroom sits at the private end. We think this is a confident, low-budget way to make an apartment feel larger. It does not depend on expensive detailing. It depends on a willingness to show the bones.

The Structure Becomes the Floor Plan

In a typical São Paulo apartment of this era, structure hides inside plastered partitions. Here a single exposed beam and column split the dining area from the kitchen. The pair reads less like a leftover and more like a doorframe scaled up to the size of a room. Look through it from the parquet side and the dining table and blue wall are framed like a picture. That framing gives the open plan a sense of sequence it would otherwise lack.

The concrete was not sanded into polite smoothness. The board marks and patches stay visible, so the history of the building's construction is part of the interior. Against that roughness, the woven-strap chairs and painted surfaces look deliberate rather than decorative.

A Hammock Between Columns

The living room shows the clearest proof that the columns are meant to be used, not just tolerated. A hammock hangs between two of them, a very Brazilian domestic gesture that turns structure into furniture. Cane armchairs and a striped rug face tall windows full of treetops, and the room feels closer to a veranda than a city apartment.

From the hammock you can see straight through to the blue-walled dining area and the kitchen beyond. That long view is the real gain of the demolition. A child growing up here will have one continuous space to move through, with the columns marking its stations.

Tile as Threshold in the Kitchen

The kitchen has no walls to announce it, so the floor does the job. Yellow and white triangle tile is set into the herringbone parquet, and the edge between them works as a threshold you feel underfoot. It is a practical choice as well: hard tile where water and grease land, warm timber everywhere else.

A pale wood island anchors the room, with two red-seated stools adding a punch of color. Painted brick, an ornate mirror and bare concrete sit side by side. Plenty of renovations try to tidy that kind of material mix into one palette. Sub Estúdio lets it stay loose, and the kitchen is livelier for it.

A Bathroom Committed to Pink

If the living spaces are about stripping back, the main bathroom is about committing fully. Pink subway tile covers the walls from floor to ceiling. A glass-enclosed walk-in shower with brass rain heads keeps the room visually whole. Even the compact toilet alcove is clad in the same glossy tile, finished with a brass hand spray and a small shelf of figurines.

A single color applied this completely turns a utilitarian room into one with real character. The brass fittings warm the pink rather than competing with it. A steel-framed window brings in daylight, so the gloss reads soft rather than clinical.

Vanities, Daylight and a Second Palette

A floating double vanity in light wood, with brass taps, suits a household that is about to get busier in the mornings. Hexagonal white floor tile and a small wooden stool keep the pink room from tipping into theme. The second bathroom swaps pink for the kitchen's yellow triangle tile. Paired with a floating white basin counter, bamboo and potted plants, it ties the wet rooms back to the shared spaces.

That repetition of tile across rooms is a quiet organizing device. A few materials recur often enough that the apartment holds together, even with its bold colors.

Plans and Drawings

The demolition plan says more about this project than any photograph. Red lines mark the walls to be removed, and they outnumber the retained black ones in the social zone. The resulting floor plan places the kitchen at the center of open living and dining rooms. The bedroom, closet and bath are grouped on the right, so the private side keeps its walls and the shared side gives them up.

The sections show where the effort went: tall cabinetry and a range hood frame the kitchen island, and the bathroom section traces tile up the full height of the walls. Both drawings put figures in the space, a reminder that these rooms were designed around how a family stands, cooks and washes.

Why This Project Matters

Families outgrow apartments constantly, and the usual answers are to move or to subdivide. The Oscar Freire Apartment points to a third option: remove partitions, expose the structure and let finishes and color define the rooms. The family keeps its building and its neighborhood, and the home works harder without getting bigger on paper.

For designers working on tight residential budgets, the lesson is that raw concrete, a change in floor tile and one committed color can carry a whole renovation. Sub Estúdio trusts the existing frame of the building, and that trust is what makes the apartment feel generous.

Oscar Freire Apartment by Sub Estúdio, São Paulo, Brazil, 2017. Photography by Tomás Cytrynowicz.

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