Havaí House is a project designed by chico barros + garoa in 2017, covers an area of 190 m2 and is located in São Paulo , Brazil. Photography by Pedro Napolitano Prata.

“This house turns itself to the inside, in a way it is instrospective, a feature that comes from the place’s specific constraints – the linear conformation of the lot, 5x35m, and its neighbour’s tall lateral walls. Because of this, views to the exterior are scarce. With the exception of the front bedroom, all environments turn to the coutryards – the indoor and the outdoor. The outdoor is the garden, where the floor is grass, there’s a tree growing, there you can take rain or sun baths. The indoors is where the aggregating areas of the house are – living room, dining room and kitchen. Its opaque gable roof does not touch the side walls, it leaves a glass strip that lets light shine through. This artifice makes the time passage moore explicit, because the internal light is conditioned to the external nuances of the wheater, be it a cloudy or rainy day, the passage of a cloud or the simple movement of the sun. The light and shadow spots on the wall vary in intensity and form, minute by minute, according to the sun’s inclination – in the summer at noon, it becomes a vertical plumb of light exposing the wall’s irregularities, where some prominent blocks materialize shadow.
In the upper ...