Type7 in São Paulo: A 5-Meter House Built for Filmmakers by 23 SUL

5 meters. That is the width of the lot in Pinheiros, São Paulo where 23 SUL Arquitetura built a house for a young filmmaking couple. 5 meters is also roughly the width of a Manhattan studio apartment. The house is 200 square meters total, across multiple levels, with a rooftop solarium, a double-height living room, and a master suite at the rear that opens to a private garden. The math requires explanation. The project is called Residência em Pinheiros. 23 SUL Arquitetura e Urbanismo is a Brazilian firm. The clients are filmmakers. The lot is 5 meters wide by 25 meters deep. The brief was to build a full family house on a plot that most residential architects would call inadequate for the purpose. ## The Structural System as the Innovation The construction methodology is the most interesting thing about this project. 23 SUL used 0.50m x 0.50m precast cement boards, 4 centimeters thick, molded on-site. This system is lighter than traditional concrete block construction, which reduces the load on the narrow foundation. The boards create an air gap between interior and exterior surfaces that improves thermal and acoustic performance. Construction waste is minimized because the boards are prefabricated. For a 5-meter-wide urban plot, the reduced foundation load is not a design preference. It is a structural requirement. The board system is the reason the house is buildable at all at the scale it achieves. ## The Double-Height and the Staircase The central organizational element is a double-height living room integrated with the kitchen, which creates vertical volume on a site that cannot achieve horizontal volume. Double-height spaces solve the most common problem of narrow houses: they feel compressed. By taking the ceiling height to double, the room registers as spacious even when the plan is 5 meters wide. The staircase connecting the levels is a sculptural element in steel and wood. In a 5-meter plan, the staircase is not background architecture. It is foreground. 23 SUL treated it as such, designing it as an object within the house rather than a circulation path around it. This is the correct decision for a house of this dimension. ## The Rooftop Solarium as the Third Floor Pinheiros is a dense inner-city neighborhood in São Paulo. Green space at grade is scarce. The rooftop solarium adds an accessible outdoor space that the lot cannot provide at ground level, and in a city that averages 18 degrees Celsius year-round, an accessible roof is not a luxury addition. It is a usable room that happens to have a sky ceiling. The master suite at the rear opens to a small garden, which is the one piece of private ground-level outdoor space the 25-meter depth of the lot allows. The garden is not large. The opening is. The filmmakers get morning light through a rear garden view that the street-facing front of a Pinheiros lot does not provide. ## Type7 and the Architecture It Documents Type7 has built its editorial identity around the spaces where design thinking exceeds the standard brief. The 23 SUL Pinheiros project fits that criterion precisely. A house built for two filmmakers on a 5-meter urban plot using a precast cement board system that solves structural problems the brief did not explicitly name is exactly the kind of decision architecture that Type7 exists to document. The project was developed between 2016 and 2018. It is being documented now because this is when it enters the conversation.