"The Space Is Inhabited by Her Memory" — Loss Is the Blueprint for This Designer's Emotive São Paulo Studio, and Music Is Its Foundation
Shaped around a single handwritten score her late mother wrote for her at birth, architect Clara Nahas's CASACOR debut explores the very meaning of home
The story architect Clara Nahas wanted to tell in this studio was a personal and musical one. "I designed it as a posthumous tribute to my mother, a musician and professional pianist," she says of the intention for Semibreve Studio, her personal debut at CASACOR São Paulo — the largest architecture, interior design, and landscaping show in the Americas. "In a sense, the space is inhabited by her memory more than by a literal resident."
Conceived as a physical manifesto against contemporary hyperconnectivity, the project transforms the designer's personal memory into spatial solutions.
Set inside Parque da Água Branca, a historical park founded in 1929 in the heart of São Paulo, the 55-square-meter studio was a completely blank shell before Nahas's intervention. Her brief came from CASACOR's 2026 theme, Mente e Coração ("mind and heart"), which encouraged architects to treat the home as a place of self-reconnection. Nahas decided to focus on introspection.
View of the living room with focus on the kitchen and wood clad ceiling. The historic parquet flooring of the original building was preserved throughout
Image credit: Camila Santos. Design: Estudio Clara Nahas
View looking into the bedroom from the living area with the Botteh Tapetes rugs covering the original parquet.
Image credit: Camila Santos. Design: Estudio Clara Nahas
"I chose to follow the path of affection and turned to my own trunk of memories, my mother's musical universe," she explains of Semibreve Studio, which embraces evocative shapes, sensory materials, and light to make them manifest spatially.
The project draws from the original handwritten score of a song Nahas's mother wrote when she was born. It has been framed and hangs as a tribute in the bedroom's study area and "the lyrical axis of the project," as she calls it.
Rather than a traditional layout, Nahas has arranged the spaces so visitors move through an inverted route that makes the studio's entire flow unique and unexpected.
"Instead of entering through the social area, you enter through the intimate zone," she explains. Guests cross the bedroom and study first, before reaching the openness of the living space. "It's meant to work like a rite of passage, a sensory filter before connecting with the soul of the house," the architect says.
The main bedroom is a bright space with high ceilings, a Pearl Chair by Nicholas Oher, and a wall light that runs the width of one of the walls.
Nahas has managed to fit an entire home, including bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen, study, and closet, into just 55 square meters without ever losing narrative depth.
This was, Nahas admits, the biggest challenge of the making of Semibreve Studio, the assembling of which required special attention. Since CASACOR only permits dry assembly on-site, every element integrated in the scheme had to be pre-built off-site.
This was also the case for the custom woodwork and masonry closures that were implemented to correct irregularities in the original architecture — a trick Nahas successfully pulled off despite the initial hesitation.
The shower area is drenched in red ceramic floor and ceiling tiles.
The kitchen was conceived to resist "purely utilitarian coldness," Nahas says. For it, she sought a style that looked monolithic and inherently social.
Built by Todeschini, the cabinetry runs along the main wall in the brand's newly launched Giardino finish, a tinted natural oak veneer, paired with a polished Da Vinci quartzite countertop.
That countertop extends into a sideboard built to hold a record player and Nahas's mother's original vinyl collection, with a niche carved out for a small bar.
Todeschini's Giardino cabinetry, in tinted natural oak veneer, anchors the kitchen alongside a polished Da Vinci quartzite countertop that extends into a sideboard.
The standout feature and most intriguing aspect is the burgundy cylindrical volume that anchors the entire plan. It encases the bathroom, a space that's color-drenched, with the floor and ceiling clad in ceramic tiles.
The countertop and backsplash are in honed Napoleon Bordeaux marble, with a wood-finish cabinet raised off the floor, chrome Cogumelo sconces flanking the mirror, and Deca fixtures in Dark Antracite.
On the exterior face of that same cylinder, in the bedroom, the curvature is clad entirely in red ceramic pieces by Keramika, rising all the way to the ceiling. "That gives the desk area a more introspective, welcoming scale," Nahas says of the effect.
The cylindrical volume's exterior face, clad in red ceramic by Keramika, rises to the ceiling and defines the bedroom's more introspective desk area. The recessed desk-vanity is cut directly from the cylindrical volume.
That desk was carved directly from the cylinder itself, via a precise cut below the main beam, doubling as a vanity with shelves that display a collection of hourglasses — objects Nahas links to memories of her mother. "It is a poetic reminder of the passage of time," she explains.
The subtle architectural details Nahas has included continue the project's musical logic. The studio takes its name and its concept from the semibreve, the musical notation.
"It's the note that fills the measure and sustains the sound, asking for a pause so its fullness can actually be heard," Nahas says. That idea of sustained rhythm shows up in the alternating ceramic pieces running along the skirting board's entire perimeter, "almost like a measure being played out in ceramic instead of sound."
Alternating ceramic pieces along the skirting board create a visual cadence Nahas describes as "a measure being played out in ceramic instead of sound".
Image credit: Camila Santos. Design: Estudio Clara Nahas
Layers of storage have been integrated to ensure a clean and uncluttered finish.
Image credit: Camila Santos. Design: Estudio Clara Nahas
The gabled ceiling has been left with exposed beams and wooden slats; these are nods to the archetype of the traditional house, while soft-toned textured paint acts, in Nahas's words, as "a silent canvas" for the rest of the space. Together, these quiet details convey the warmth that makes Semibreve Studio so welcoming and familiar at first glance.
The project is a temporary installation. But in striving to render the enduring impact that people hold on our lives — whether or not this can be perceived by our eyes — it stretches beyond its physical limits.
A reminder that home is first and foremost the place where we feel most loved, and the one that knows us best, Semibreve Studio might not be permanent, but it's eternal.
