A São Paulo Home Stages a Showdown Between Matching Indoor and Outdoor Kitchens

On the outside, it’s a humble and unassuming house, a simple gabled white box squeezed in by its neighbors on a São Paulo street, unadorned except for piercing red window frames. But inside it opens up like a cathedral, with a ceiling soaring 40 feet above a nave-like atrium that runs the height of the building’s three stories. It’s illuminated by daylight from above and a wall of windows—framed in the same shocking red—in the rear of the house that separates the kitchen from, well, the kitchen.

On the interior, a conventional kitchen continues right up to the window wall, which opens via sliding doors to a courtyard-like outdoor room, and the other kitchen, the open-air counterpart to the interior space. The countertops and cooking surfaces seem to pass through the glass to create one continuous culinary line. It’s the most memorable move in a home designed to give a sense of being in nature on a narrow urban lot.