Fernanda Marques Curates a Warm São Paulo Penthouse Filled with Brazilian Art

“It totally changed the atmosphere,” says architect Fernanda Marques of a colorful painting by Brazil-born artist Luiz Zerbini that now anchors her clients’ São Paulo penthouse. Hanging the artwork wasn’t without drama. The 13-foot-long piece couldn’t fit in the elevator and had to be hoisted up from the street, halting traffic along the way. But the effort affirmed a belief Marques has long held: Art is the emotional center of a home.

The apartment sits in the heart of São Paulo, stretching roughly 10,365 square feet across two levels. Marques was astounded by its view. For a city that swells with skyscrapers, the penthouse has surprisingly long sightlines; she could actually see the horizon. Two units were joined to create one residence for a couple merging families from previous marriages into a new home for themselves and five children. Both partners had lived in houses their entire lives, making this their first apartment—a shift in perspective that informed Marques’s approach.

“At its core, the project is defined by the fluid transition between indoor and outdoor spaces, translating the idea of a ‘suspended house,’” says Marques. The penthouse sits at the height of treetops that line the street, so she carefully planned the residence to absorb the leafy canopy. Minimalist banisters along the terrace allow foliage to permeate views from inside, while living walls bookend the outdoor areas and visually extend the treeline.

“At night, we light them so they read as if they belong to the home, as if the apartment had its own private garden floating above the city,” she says of the treetops. “But that small sleight of hand is everything, because it’s what lets a penthouse feel like a house with a garden.” Inside, warm woods, stone, and neutral tones establish a calm palette. The pared-back finishes allow art to set the mood. “The architecture is the silence—art is the voice,” says Marques.

The couple only owned a handful of artworks before embarking on this project, making the collection entirely new. Over the course of roughly ten gallery visits, they assembled it alongside the apartment’s evolution. They sought works not to fill walls, but to build character. “Every piece was chosen because it made one of us happy in the room, never because it was an investment,” says Marques. “So the collection holds together the way a family does—by affection and joy, not by a single idea.”

Still, Marques recognizes that a subtle theme emerged naturally. “So many of the pieces turned out to be geometric or kinetic, always alongside strong color and a real sense of play,” she says, pointing to works by Julio Le Parc and Abraham Palatnik. 

Marques notes a square Palatnik painting behind the dining table, a chevron-like field of bright and dark greens that appear to pulse across the canvas. The energy of the piece “asked the whole wall to go quiet and dark so it could vibrate,” she says. “The room was composed around it.”

In the internal elevator, art doubles down—and up—with two murals painted directly on the walls by local artist Crânio, one on each floor. As the elevator rises, a floating indigenous figure gazes toward the sky in an underwater world, which gives way on the second floor to a cosmic scene. The brief ride becomes a stratospheric journey. There are other playful moments; just outside the elevator, a bronze work by Vanderlei Lopes pools across the floor like spilled water. “It has humor, it isn’t a household name, and it sets a relaxed, playful tone the moment you arrive,” she says. 

The clients hired Marques in part because they admired her taste. Naturally, she incorporated many of her favorite artists, including Jorge Mayet, whose work also appears in her own home. His sculpture hovers like a floating uprooted tree that “gives the living room a sense of weightlessness, of nature lifting off the ground,” reinforcing the home’s suspended setting among the treetops.

This narrative wasn’t sourced entirely through art galleries, of course. Collectible furniture by Brazilian designers Jader Almeida, Jacqueline Terpins, and Jorge Zalszupin sit comfortably throughout the home. And the architecture was its own art form. “I have an instinct for sculpture in everything I do,” Marques says, noting the freedom she had to shape a blank canvas. “I’m simply not able to make a staircase the way everyone else makes a staircase.”

A monumental spiral staircase corkscrews toward a circular opening like a portal to the upper floor, its ribbon-like black steel banister contrasting with the warm wood surfaces surrounding it. Above, a pool with transparent walls resembles a clean-lined fishbowl, turning swimming into a performance. A travertine hot tub commands its own open-air room, complete with stepped plinths and a modernist build that extends the artistic vision outdoors.  

“I always look for the gesture that turns a functional element into something beautiful, something with its own presence,” she adds, noting that every feature remains fully usable. “The sculpture is real only when the family is actually using it and loving it.”

The mood shifts past the dining room through a concealed door, where the bedrooms become more subdued. In the primary suite, a custom bed sits against upholstered wall-to-wall panels that soften the architecture, while an artwork by Shirley Paes Leme—a sculptural script reading “escorre em silêncio o mel da noite,” or, “night’s honey drips in silence”—appears to drip across the wall as through written with a fountain pen filled with molten bronze. 

Marques’ commitment to Brazilian design cuts deeper than the surface. She was keen to create a home that presented art in a way that felt natural for the family. Sophistication and warmth are not opposites in Brazil, she says, and she ensured the collection never felt precious. Here, art hangs beside the television and appears in hallways and corners the children pass every day, fully woven into daily life.

“That casual intimacy, the color, the sensoriality, the humor, that is very Brazilian,” says Marques. “We treat beauty as something to be used and lived in—not admired from a distance.”