SIG BERGAMIN BUILDS A PENTHOUSE AROUND A GLASS POOL

A swimming pool with a fully glass bottom sits directly above the main living room in a Porto Alegre penthouse, and a sculptural spiral staircase counterweights it on the opposite side of the floor plan. Neither element is decoration. Together they are the entire architectural argument Sig Bergamin and Murilo Lomas built the apartment around, a structure engineered to hold two showpieces the size of rooms rather than one.

The client wanted color, not restraint. Alexandre Grendene Bartelle and his wife Nora Teixeira asked Bergamin and Lomas for a cheerful, colorful, modern apartment built to hold their art collection, and the designers answered with a blue, green, red, and yellow palette loud enough to compete with the pieces on the walls rather than recede behind them.

A Glass Bottomed Pool Sits Above the Living Room

The pool is the load bearing idea of the whole project, not a rooftop amenity bolted on afterward. Its glass floor turns the water into a visible ceiling element from the main living spaces below, while the helical staircase across the plan does the opposite job, a solid sculptural mass anchoring the space the pool's transparency floats above. Bergamin and Lomas have not disclosed exact square footage, budget, or a completion date for the project, but the design logic reads clearly enough without them, the two hardest elements to build in any home, a pool and a switchback stair, doing double duty as the apartment's actual furniture.

Photographer Fran Parente, a Sao Paulo and New York based architect turned photographer whose client list includes Bottega Veneta and Kate Spade Brasil, shot the finished spaces for publication, framing the staircase and the pool as the two subjects the rest of the apartment is built to serve.

Anish Kapoor and Fernando Botero Share One Hallway

The art collection is not incidental to the architecture, it is the brief. Grendene Bartelle and Teixeira's holdings include work from Anish Kapoor, the British Indian sculptor whose mirror finish steel pieces sit in the Tate and MoMA and who won the Turner Prize in 1991, alongside Manolo Valdes, the Spanish painter and sculptor who represented Spain at the 1999 Venice Biennale with bronze reworkings of Velazquez, and Fernando Botero, the Colombian painter and sculptor whose inflated Boterismo figures made him the most recognized Latin American artist of his generation before his death in 2023. Carole Feuerman's hyperrealist swimmer sculptures and Pablo Atchugarry's monolithic Brancusi indebted marble forms round out a collection that spans four continents of sculptural tradition inside one home.

Housing Kapoor's polished steel and Botero's inflated bronze in the same rooms is a curatorial decision as much as an architectural one, and it explains why the interiors lean toward bold color and sculptural drama rather than the neutral gallery white a smaller collection might call for.

Sig Bergamin and Murilo Lomas Run the Studio Together

Bergamin built his reputation over 35 years across Brazil, the United States, and Europe, a Santos School of Architecture graduate whose Sao Paulo firm now keeps outposts in New York and Paris and whose name sits on both Architectural Digest's AD100 and Elle Decor's A List. Lomas is his partner in the studio and in life, and the two keep homes in Sao Paulo, New York, Paris, and Miami that function as their own running argument for maximalist color against a backdrop of serious art, the same formula scaled up for a client's penthouse here. Their eclectic, layered style puts them in company with other Brazilian firms working the same tension between drama and restraint, including Mareines's 1,350 square meter cloister house and Estudio BG's courtyard centered Res Patio, both built on the idea that a single architectural gesture, a cloister, a courtyard, a staircase, can organize an entire home.

The Client Behind This Penthouse Also Makes Flip Flops

Alexandre Grendene Bartelle's surname belongs to Grendene, the Brazilian footwear conglomerate behind Melissa's jelly shoes and Ipanema's flip flops, a company built on injection molded plastic sold by the hundreds of millions of pairs worldwide. A client whose family fortune runs through mass market footwear commissioning a penthouse this maximalist, built around a Turner Prize winner's steel and a museum loan quality Botero, is its own quiet statement about where industrial fortunes in Brazil eventually land. The staircase and the pool are the architecture's showpieces. The art collection they were built to hold is the real budget line nobody photographs.