Garden Coverage Turns 1980s Penthouse Into Layered Family Home
Garden Coverage unfolds across a 580m² penthouse apartment in São Paulo, Brazil, where Diego Revollo Arquitetura responds to a robust 1980s structure with vivid interiors. The project sits in the Jardins neighborhood and reshapes a recently renovated, Mediterranean-style building into a layered home for a young couple and their children. Color, material, and furniture placement carry most of the work, turning a neutral renovation into a residence with clear family rhythms.
Light slides across the rough Roman travertine floor and picks up every change in level, giving the large penthouse a quiet shimmer underfoot. From the first step inside, color, stone, and wood start a conversation with the building’s Mediterranean bones and the young family’s everyday rituals.
This apartment in São Paulo’s Jardins neighborhood spans two floors and grows out of a classic 1980s structure with sturdy proportions and noble finishes. Diego Revollo Arquitetura works with that inheritance rather than against it, preserving the Roman travertine and solid shell while rethinking palette, furniture, and joinery. The narrative is less about demolition and more about how color, texture, and layout add personality to a once impersonal renovation.
On the main level, the large social floor reads as one continuous field of pale stone warmed by scattered moments of color and metal. Here the program stretches from dining to lounging to television without hard breaks, so Revollo uses a sculptural sofa to trace softer boundaries, shaping smaller corners for conversation and rest within the open plan. A bookcase pulls double duty, acting as both storage and the armature for a home theater, where a deep sofa anchors family movie nights.
Color Grounds The Social Floor
Against the light Roman travertine, a palette of blues, turquoise, and beige keeps the generous rooms calm but never flat. Strategic black accents step in as punctuation, sharpening sightlines and letting pale stone and soft upholstery breathe around them. Rather than rely on pattern, the composition plays with saturation and tone, so each seating area holds its own mood while still reading as part of a continuous whole.
Three suites sit on this lower level, each answering a different daily rhythm for the family. The eldest child’s room leans into playful woodwork, with joinery that supports study, sleep, and storage without visual clutter. In the couple’s suite, beige limestone wraps separate bathrooms and a generous closet, shifting the material register slightly darker and more intimate while keeping continuity with the travertine outside.
Wood Warms The Upper Level
Upstairs, the atmosphere changes as Cumaru lines the ceiling and Sucupira wraps walls and shelving, folding the multipurpose room into a warmer shell. This floor holds a gourmet kitchen with dining at one end, a long L-shaped sofa with a large television at the other, plus a games table and a single armchair for reading. Continuous wood could have driven the rooms toward predictable neutrals, but Revollo steers the composition through bolder decisions in fabric and color.
A green velvet curtain runs along one edge, meeting shades of burgundy, red, and brown in upholstery and accessories. Those choices give depth to the wood rather than compete with it, creating a room that feels both grounded and animated for evenings with friends or long family weekends. The effect underscores the multipurpose role of this level, where shared meals, quiet reading, and play all sit within one coherent setting.
Rooms For Play And Pause
One former suite becomes a playroom, tailored to younger children and close enough to the social core that supervision stays easy without dominating the main living areas. Another room works as an office yet can shift into a guest suite when needed, with the same strong wood presence tying it back to the wider floor. That consistency in material makes these more private corners feel connected to the central family zones.
Outside on the upper level, a strip of blue quartzite shapes a lap pool that runs along one side of the terrace. Next to it, upholstered seating, armchairs, and ottomans arrange an outdoor living area that reads as an extension of the interiors rather than a separate deck. Textures stay soft under hand and foot, so the move from wood-lined multipurpose room to open air feels natural.
By leaning on an existing structure and its stone floors, Garden Coverage focuses its energy on surfaces, color, and the way furniture draws people together. Daylight moves from pale travertine to honeyed wood and then out to blue quartzite, tracing the family’s path through meals, play, and rest. The result is a home tuned to daily use, with every level carrying its own tone while still speaking the same material language.
Photography courtesy of Diego Revollo Arquitetura
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