House & Home Section > Style Desk<\/p>\n\n\n\n
MAKING AN ENTRANCE
Open to the Stars, Indoors and Out<\/p>\n\n\n\n
text by Raul Barreneche<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n SAO PAULO, Brazil \u2013 Fernando Alt\u00e9rio is known as Mr. Showbiz. He produces concerts by musical stalwarts like Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso, a singer and a songwriter who has a musical cameo in Pedro Almod\u00f3var\u2019s movie \u201dTalk to Her.\u201d MAKING AN ENTRANCE
After the encores, Mr. Alt\u00e9rio, 50, likes to take the backstage entourage home with him. The post-concert parties at his home here in Jardim Europa, an elegant neighborhood with houses tucked behind walls, rarely start before midnight. Mr. Alt\u00e9rio\u2019s two-story living room plays center stage to a loungey, laid-back scene with a mix of musicians, friends and models, who linger over Scotch and Champagne as late as 5 a.m. A white archway acts as a giant proscenium framing a recessed dining area. Above the arch is a balcony, where guests can scan the crowd. When Mr. Alt\u00e9rio slides open a wall of 21-foot-tall glass doors mounted on wheels, the vast living room becomes a giant open-air porch. Strains of Brazilian jazz follow the guests as they spill out into a courtyard garden that has a lap pool with a wall of smooth pebbles as a backdrop.
The showman behind Mr. Alt\u00e9rio\u2019s $1.3 million party house is Isay Weinfeld, a S\u00e3o Paulo architect whose boldly scaled spaces have attracted a high-powered following and comparisons to Oscar Niemeyer, who created an unmistakably Brazilian brand of modern architecture at Bras\u00edlia and elsewhere more than 40 years ago. Mr. Weinfeld\u2019s popularity derives from his use of Brazilian materials and textures, which yield an inviting tropical modernism that serves as an antidote to the chilly monastic minimalism of recent years.
The homes, stores and galleries Mr. Weinfeld designs for influential figures in Brazilian entertainment and fashion are soaring, wide-open spaces in keeping with the country\u2019s famous taste for the bold and beautiful. \u201dArchitecture must surprise, thrill, cause heart attacks,\u201d Mr. Weinfeld said. \u201dI like to make architecture the same way that Jo\u00e3o Gilberto sings, that Paul Smith designs clothes, that Caetano Veloso thinks, that my daughter smiles.\u201d
His clients include Carolina Ferraz, the Brazilian actress, and Hector Babenco, director of \u201dKiss of the Spider Woman.\u201d
\u201dIsay is like a doctor, very discreet,\u201d Mr. Babenco said. \u201dHe never mentions anything about his other clients. He doesn\u2019t play the games of the rich and famous. Despite being very sophisticated, he is a very austere person.\u201d
With his slouchy stance, button-down oxford shirts and neatly trimmed beard, Mr. Weinfeld looks more like a friendly music teacher than an architect. The two-bedroom apartment he shares with his daughter Paula, 21, an actress who is studying for a bachelor\u2019s degree in film, demonstrates his taste for simplicity. The apartment, in a nondescript 1950\u2032s tower, has Shaker-like 18th-century Brazilian wood tables and dressers, midcentury chairs and collections of vintage blue glass. \u201dI love finding very simple pieces from every period,\u201d Mr. Weinfeld said.
On the walls are monochromatic canvases by his favorite artist, the Swiss-born Mira Schendel. \u201dHe buys mainly pieces that are white on white, but sometimes off white,\u201d said Luisa Strina, a prominent Brazilian art dealer. Mr. Weinfeld has been buying art for himself and for his clients from Ms. Strina since they met in 1974. He did a $70,000 renovation of her gallery on the fashionable Rua Oscar Freire here, and it reopened last March with an imposing exterior of black stucco to offset its neutral interiors.
His design for Forum, the flagship boutique of the fashion designer Tufi Duek, completed in 2000 on S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s high-end shopping strip, is a typical mix of understatement and tropical spectacle. After walking through an all-white space \u2014 white-on-white floors, walls and ceilings \u2014 where the clothes are tucked discreetly to the sides, shoppers turn a corner to find a two-story atrium with a red staircase covered in tiny glass tiles, a showstopping Brazilian rendition of the stairs Marilyn Monroe slunk down in \u201dGentlemen Prefer Blondes.\u201d
The stairs lead up to a rustic counter with chunky wood stools, where shoppers are served wine or demitasse cups of Brazilian espresso; rising behind it is a wall of handmade wattle and daub, the same materials used to build rustic homes in northern Brazil.
\u201dThere are a lot of similarities between my work and the store,\u201d Mr. Duek said. \u201dI wanted something modern, but with Brazilian characteristics. Isay knew how to interpret it.\u201d
If Forum has an unmistakable cinematic quality, it\u2019s no wonder. \u201dIngmar Bergman, Jacques Tati, Luis Bu\u00f1uel and Andy Warhol have been much more of an influence on my architecture than Le Corbusier,\u201d Mr. Weinfeld said.
The influence is noticeable throughout his portfolio. At a house owned by the Sverner family in Jardim Europa a few blocks from Mr. Alt\u00e9rio\u2019s home, Mr. Weinfeld clad a second-floor hallway with Brazilian arenite stone and washed it in light from a narrow skylight. The effect, he said, was inspired by a hallway in the Bergman film \u201dThe Silence.\u201d
Downstairs, he put a wall of sliding glass doors framed in caramel-colored pine that form a breezy link between the living spaces and a walled-in garden.
Mr. Weinfeld is hardly the first architect to look to the movies for inspiration, but few architects have actually made a film. Mr. Weinfeld and his friend M\u00e1rcio Kogan, an architect who also practices in S\u00e3o Paulo, have written and directed 14 short films and one full-length feature, a comedy called \u201dFogo e Paix\u00e3o\u201d (\u201dFire and Passion\u201d). The film was released in 1988, and it won the S\u00e3o Paulo Art Critics Association prize for best new director, which Mr. Weinfeld and Mr. Kogan shared. Mr. Babenco described their style as \u201da mix between Jacques Tati and John Waters, kitsch but economical.\u201d
With his mix of striking high modernist spaces and native Brazilian accents, Mr. Weinfeld is the successor to Oscar Niemeyer. Still feisty and practicing in Rio de Janeiro at 95, Mr. Niemeyer adapted the cold, rigid International style of Le Corbusier to the temperament of his homeland \u2014 warm, sensual, often boisterous \u2014 with sweeping curves and soaring spaces.
Mr. Weinfeld\u2019s designs are not as curvaceous as Mr. Niemeyer\u2019s, but they are just as riveting. A 90-minute drive to the south of S\u00e3o Paulo, in the beach town of Tijucopava, Mr. Weinfeld built a home for a S\u00e3o Paulo family, the Bitters, who have a successful textile business. The towering living room has 15 1\/2-foot-tall glass doors that pivot open on vertical hinges, leading to a cobalt pool and a sweeping view of the tropical coastline.
As a designer, Mr. Weinfeld conducts himself like a meticulous movie director: relentless in his quest for the perfect this or the ultimate that. The search for furnishings for his newest project, a 69-room boutique hotel in S\u00e3o Paulo, has taken him on shopping trips all over the world.
The hotel, which Mr. Weinfeld is designing with Mr. Kogan, is the brainchild of Rog\u00e9rio Fasano, the head of Brazil\u2019s most famous gastronomic family and an owner of the celebrated Fasano restaurant in S\u00e3o Paulo. Mr. Weinfeld met Mr. Fasano at the restaurant eight years ago, and they became friends.
To furnish the hotel, which will be named the Fasano and will open in April, they combed flea markets in London and Paris, furniture shops in New York City and antiques stores in Hudson, N.Y., where last November they found old frames in which they plan to mount guest-room mirrors. In Murano, Italy, they bought small handmade glass picture frames to display postcards of Brazil and Italy. The frames will add a touch of color to the modern but clubby rooms, which will be furnished in brown tones, with well-worn Florence Knoll leather sofas and Mr. Weinfeld\u2019s custom furniture in dark Brazilian imbuia wood.
In London, Mr. Fasano came across a building that was being built with what he considered the perfect brown brick for the hotel\u2019s exterior. He and Mr. Weinfeld tracked the bricks all the way to a manufacturer in North Carolina.
\u201dIsay and I think in the same way,\u201d Mr. Fasano said. \u201dI was looking for someone who could think about every detail.\u201d
Mr. Weinfeld\u2019s quest for detail now has him hunting for a grand piano to occupy center stage in Mr. Alt\u00e9rio\u2019s living room. But he doesn\u2019t want just any shiny black baby grand \u2014 he wants one in natural wood to complement the textures and materials of Mr. Alt\u00e9rio\u2019s home.
Mr. Weinfeld still hasn\u2019t found the perfect piano. But when he does, Mr. Alt\u00e9rio said, \u201dthen we\u2019ll be playing live music at my parties.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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