Tadu Arquitetura Turns Rio's First Granado Factory into a Food Hall Built Around a Brick Courtyard

On Rua do Senado, in the dense grid of Rio de Janeiro's Centro, five historic buildings that once held the first Granado factory, opened in 1903, now operate as Mercado Central. Tadu Arquitetura, with Thiago Tavares as lead architect and Patrícia Fontaine coordinating, has converted the 800 m² complex into a hub for food, art and urban life. The program includes three restaurants with indoor and outdoor seating and a set of leisure rooms threaded through the old structures.

The interesting part is restraint. The brief could easily have produced a polished heritage shell with a new interior laid over it. Tadu does the opposite: the brick, timber trusses, granite piers and rough wall edges stay visible, and the new layer is limited to counters, furniture, lighting and a few cut openings. The result reads less like a restoration and more like a careful occupation of a building that has had several lives already.

A Street Front That Stays Part of the Block

From above, the complex is hard to separate from its neighbors: terracotta roofs, pale facades and the clutter of rooftop equipment that defines downtown Rio. That is a deliberate non-gesture. Mercado Central does not announce itself with a new volume or signage tower. It relies on the existing street wall, with its wrought iron balcony, blue shutters and granite columns.

The key move happens at ground level. The granite piers and iron grilles are opened up so the restaurant spills toward the sidewalk, and you can see diners from the street in daylight. For a district that often empties out after office hours, a porous ground floor matters more than any facade restoration could.

The Courtyard as the Project's Center of Gravity

The open-air brick courtyard is where the project earns its name. A long timber table, green metal chairs and potted plants sit under exposed steel beams, a frame that recalls the factory's working past without turning it into a museum piece. The sun falls hard here, and the space feels like a public square that happens to be behind a facade.

We like how the courtyard is staged from the interior. Rough plastered openings and a narrow side hall lined with wooden tables pull you toward the light, so the sequence moves from a compressed interior to a bright open room. It is an old urban trick, and it works because the architects left the thresholds raw rather than framing them with new trim.

Counters as Contemporary Furniture

The clearest new insertions are the stainless steel counters. They curve, they carry red stools, and above them hang suspended shelves of jars and crates that nod to the stock of an old pharmacy or a market stall. Green pendant lamps tie the counters to the courtyard furniture.

This is where the design could have gone wrong. Stainless steel next to white-painted brick can feel clinical. Here the counters work as freestanding objects inside the old room, with cooks visible behind them. The kitchen becomes part of the show, and the historic walls remain a backdrop rather than a surface to be finished.

Long Rooms and Color Signals

The dining hall exploits the deep plan of the old factory. Looking down its length, the eye passes red stools and green pendants to a red tiled bar at the far end, while another view frames the sunlit courtyard through the counter zone. Red, yellow and green act as a simple wayfinding system across the complex.

That palette is the one place where the project is loud, and it is a smart choice. Color is cheap, reversible and legible, and it lets each of the three restaurants have its own identity without anyone needing to alter the historic structure.

Leisure Rooms Under the Trusses

Not every room serves food. Upstairs, ping pong tables and red plastic stools occupy halls with exposed timber roof trusses, tall shuttered doors and a terracotta block wall. The trusses do the architectural work; the program is almost casual.

Putting table tennis in a heritage building is a pointed statement about who the space is for. It invites lingering without requiring a bill, and that broadens the mix of people a food hall usually attracts.

Cutting Into the Old Fabric

Where new connections were needed, Tadu cut openings and left the evidence. Exposed concrete lintels sit inside white walls, and the brick edges around the cuts are left rough. Concrete steps and a raised bench run along one wall, with red pipework exposed and skylights washing light down over the timber trusses.

The approach is honest about the intervention. You can read which parts are 1903 and which are new without a plaque. Services that a more conventional fit-out would hide in ceilings are treated as part of the visual record.

Plans and Drawings

The ground floor plan shows the logic plainly: a long interior hall holding the kitchen and tables, restrooms tucked to one side, and the paved courtyard with its long tables at the end of the sequence. Upstairs, the plan opens into large rooms organized around stair cores, a service block and a partly open void over the courtyard.

The longitudinal section explains how the pieces connect: a trussed roof over the dining hall, a sloped ramp, the planted courtyard and a multi-storey block behind. The elevation of the ornate yellow-highlighted facade, with balconies, arched windows, pediment and a roll-down shutter at street level, shows how little the exterior has been asked to change.

Why This Project Matters

Downtown Rio has no shortage of historic buildings, and plenty of them sit underused. Mercado Central offers a model that is modest in its means: keep the structure visible, insert furniture-scale elements, open the ground floor, and let a courtyard become a public room. Across 800 m² spread over five buildings, that is a realistic template rather than a one-off spectacle.

The bigger lesson is about mixing programs. By combining three restaurants with art, culture and free-to-use leisure rooms, the project gives people reasons to come back to Centro at different times of day. Heritage here is not something to be preserved behind glass. It is something you sit inside, eat in and play ping pong under.

Mercado Central by Tadu Arquitetura (lead architect Thiago Tavares; coordination Patrícia Fontaine; team Isabela Moraes, Renato Rampini, Rafael Vermil). Location: Rua do Senado 46–48, Centro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Area: 800 m². Year: 2026. Photography: Rafael Salim.

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