Founders of Estudio Campana design their first home

Wildly inventive, the Campana brothers, Humberto and Fernando, are the celebrated São Paulo design team who made the famous ‘Banquete' chair (2002), composed of stuffed toys, and then created its acclaimed opposite, the ‘Favela' armchair (2003), constructed of scraps of wood like the homemade shacks in Brazil's slums. Even as the siblings have gone on to put their stamp on hotels, showrooms, and the restaurant at São Paulo's Theatro Municipal, they have continued to incorporate odd combinations of materials—fish skin, crystal, rope, bronze—into their sofas, tables, and lamps. Now, the founders of Estudio Campana have designed their first house from the ground up; and it's fittingly adventuresome.

MEDIA SAVVY Situated in São Paulo's posh Jardins neighbourhood, Solange Ricoy and Stefano Zunino's home presents an arresting street facade—it is clad top to bottom in shaggy piaçava-palm straw. “It's like a house of grass,” marvels Solange, the founder and CEO of Alexandria Group, an international branding and strategy consultancy. She and her husband—CEO Latin America and head of digital worldwide for the advertising agency J Walter Thompson—acquired the narrow lot seven years ago and commissioned the Campanas, who are now their close friends, because, she says, “they have the expression of Brazil”.

这对夫妇希望家里都很大程度上opaque facade that would frustrate the prying eyes of passers-by and an airy interior that would flow into a rear garden. That way the family (including two young sons, Niccoló and Costantino, still at home, and an older son and daughter, Matteo and Benedetta, off at college) “could live inside as if we were living outside and live outside with the comforts of living inside”, Solange says. Their other request was for a multi-storey bookcase that would be “the central element of the house”, she says, and that could hold about a thousand volumes.

Based on those criteria, the project became, Humberto says, “an exercise in volume, light, and functionality”. The brothers also decided to employ a broader spectrum of furnishings than what they use in their usual assignments. “It would have been very dictatorial if we had just used our furniture,” Fernando explains. “It's not a Campana showroom.”

The house, Solange recalls, went through several iterations before construction started. (The skeletal bookcase alone was redesigned seven times.) “There was the favela style, then Brazilian baroque, and then we came back to a simple, very South American tropical look, which is the Campanas' style, together with some Italian design,” she says. “They made a fusion that reflects us: My husband is Italian, and I am Argentine.” As for the layout, the basement level—which opens to a dry moat planted with cacti—is given over to staff quarters and the garage. The living room, library, kitchen, and main terrace are on the ground floor, while the first floor has bedrooms for the children and a deep balcony that stretches across the rear facade of grey-painted concrete. The master suite sits on the roof, wrapped by a terrace in the manner of a penthouse.

And that unusual component on the front of the dwelling? Insulating and water-repellent, piaçava often appears in sturdy brooms and as roofing on beach kiosks in Brazil. Though this was the first time the Campanas used the material on a building, they have employed it before. In 2003, they designed a chandelier combining piaçava and Swarovski crystals; and in 2007 they covered a wall with it for the MyHome exhibition at Germany's Vitra Design Museum. For this São Paulo house, the straw—attached to wood slats that are hung on an aluminium framework—will need to be replaced every few years or so.

FLOOR PLAY If the house's woolly front is startling—and a perfect pit stop for wild parrots—so too is the faux-primitive leather-wrapped bookcase, which rises up to a skylight that allows tropical rays to pour deep inside. Otherwise, the rooms are simply furnished, with bright colours relieving the mostly white-walled spaces. The kitchen floor is made of vivid red-orange quartz; “Solange and I love Pantone's tangerine,” Stefano says. One bath is copper in tone, another blue, and a third scarlet. The living room gets a splash of green from the landscape, not only through the windows, but also via an oversize cloud-shaped mirror that reflects the lush plantings.

To further merge house and garden, the designers placed large windows across the rear and sides of the residence and installed glass pocket doors. The master bedroom, though intended to be the most private of the spaces, can also become the most exposed. With its glass portals open wide, the room becomes an alfresco pavilion, shielded from a neighbouring house by a hedge of mandacaru, a tree-like Brazilian cactus. A fireplace suspended from the bedroom ceiling can rotate 360 degrees to cast warmth in any direction.

Given the building's transparency and multiple terraces, it is no surprise that Solange, Stefano, and their children can be found outside more often than inside. And Niccoló and Costantino have discovered that the home's funky pelt makes it easy to tell friends where they live. As their mother explains with a smile, “The boys call it the ‘Mammoth House'.”