For Paola Lenti’s São Paulo flagship, Armentano Arquitetura (AARQ) designed a building that knows when to recede. Wrapped in glass, dark metal, and a growing veil of vegetation, the three-story showroom acts less like a conventional retail interior and more like a framework for the Italian brand’s color-rich, tactile furniture.
Photography by Ruy Teixeira
Located in São Paulo’s Jardins neighborhood, the 8,100-square-foot flagship was conceived for Paola Lenti, whose work combines technical innovation with artisanal approaches to fibers and textiles. The brand, represented exclusively in Brazil by Casual Móveis, now operates in more than 60 countries.
For AARQ, the challenge was to give that visual identity room to breathe. “Our role isn’t to compete visually with the objects,” says João Armentano, AARQ’s partner and creative director. “It’s precisely to frame them in the best possible way.”
Photography by Ruy Teixeira
That thinking shaped the building from the inside out. An open floor plan allows the furniture to be rearranged freely, while an independent metal structure keeps the interior fluid and largely uninterrupted. The structural grid echoes the technical precision of Paola Lenti’s furniture, while the glass envelope keeps the interior visually open to the surrounding landscape.
Photography by Ruy Teixeira
But the building’s defining gesture is its planted façade. Tensioned steel cables span the openings of the metal structure, providing a framework for vines that cascade downward across the glass. The effect is already lush, but deliberately unfinished: the planting is intended to continue growing until it forms an even denser veil, filtering daylight as it enters the showroom.
Photography by Ruy Teixeira
That living membrane creates a direct link between architecture and product. Paola Lenti’s furniture often relies on highly engineered fibers woven into textured, vividly colored surfaces; here, AARQ translates that language into a botanical skin. The idea developed gradually: the steel cables appeared in early studies, while the façade planting came later, evolving alongside the decision to use glass. On a compact urban site surrounded by neighboring buildings, transparency was not an obvious choice, but the growing landscape gave the glass envelope both privacy and softness.
Photography by Ruy Teixeira
Inside, that contrast becomes especially pronounced. Matte-black staircases and structural elements read as precise, almost graphic interventions against broad expanses of foliage. Elsewhere, floor-to-ceiling glazing frames palms, broad-leafed tropical plants, and trailing vines, making the greenery feel like part of the interior composition rather than something viewed from a distance.
The decision to wait before photographing the completed project was intentional. AARQ wanted the vegetation to begin performing its architectural role before the building was documented. Armentano notes that the façade was conceived to change over time, much like the interiors it contains. In an era dominated by instant images, that slower evolution became part of the project’s meaning.
Photography by Ruy Teixeira
The original design sketch makes that ambition especially clear: even at the conceptual stage, the building was imagined as a dark, rectilinear volume gradually softened by planting, with architecture and landscape working as a single composition. The finished flagship retains that tension between control and growth, precision and texture.
For Armentano, the combination of metal structure, tension cables, glass, and vegetation best captures the project as a whole. It is both a technical solution and an architectural translation of Paola Lenti’s design language—one that will only become more legible as the plants continue to take over.
