Paola Lenti’s São Paulo flagship operates less as a conventional showroom and more as a dynamic setting highlighting the brand’s furniture collection. The three-story venue, situated in the Jardins district, spans 8,100 square feet and is clad in glass, dark metal, and a spreading vegetative screen. Armentano Arquitetura crafted the design to visually step back, enabling the Italian brand’s lively, tactile furniture to dominate the scene.
Design Intent and Structural Approach
Armentano Arquitetura aimed to ensure the visual identity could breathe freely. “Our role isn’t to compete visually with the objects,” says João Armentano, AARQ’s partner and creative director. “It’s precisely to frame them in the best possible way.” This concept influenced the building’s internal design. The open layout permits flexible furniture arrangement, supported by a standalone metal framework that maintains an unobstructed interior flow. The structural grid mirrors the technical precision in Paola Lenti’s furniture, and the glass skin keeps the interior visually connected to the surrounding environment.
The exterior incorporates tensioned steel cables spanning the metal structure’s openings, serving as supports for vines that drape down over the glass. The result is lush, though the planting is deliberately left to grow further, aiming to develop into a thicker veil that diffuses daylight within the showroom. This living layer directly connects architecture and product, converting the brand’s engineered fiber language into a botanical exterior.
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Interplay of Texture and Light
Inside, matte-black staircases and structural components stand out as precise, graphic elements contrasting with extensive foliage. Elsewhere, floor-to-ceiling glazing encompasses palms, broad-leafed tropical plants, and trailing vines, integrating the greenery into the interior design rather than merely presenting it as a distant view. The team chose to delay photography until the project’s completion, with Armentano emphasizing that the façade was envisioned to evolve over time, similar to its interior. In an age driven by immediate visuals, this gradual transformation holds significance.
The initial design sketch clearly illustrates this vision: at the conceptual phase, the structure was portrayed as a dark, geometric form gradually eased by planting, with architecture and surroundings functioning as a unified entity. The completed flagship upholds this tension between control and growth, precision and texture. For Armentano, the blend of metal framework, tension cables, glass, and vegetation encapsulates the project comprehensively. It functions as both a technical solution and an architectural interpretation of Paola Lenti’s design ethos—one that will grow increasingly evident as vegetation spreads.
