SÃO PAULO AT HIS FEET

Shoe designer Alexandre Birman worked with a local interior design team to weave Brazilian modernism, Art Deco flair, Roman hospitality, and his own peripatetic calendar into a serene apartment in the sky.

- Ian Phillips

Visitors to Alexandre Birman’s penthouse apartment in São Paulo are greeted by a who’s who of Brazilian modernist design. The armchair in the entry is by Lina Bo Bardi and Giancarlo Palanti, a pair of Italians who helped define Brazil’s midcentury style. There is seating by Sergio Rodrigues and Jorge Zalszupin, and a rare desk by Oscar Niemeyer’s go-to furniture designer, Joaquim Tenreiro. “I like different styles,” says Birman, a fashion entrepreneur who has his own shoe label and is head of the company that owns the fashion brand Farm Rio. “But nothing is as dear to my heart as Brazilian midcentury design.”

In postwar Brazil industrial materials like plastic and fiberglass—staples of modernism in Europe and America—were hard to come by. Designers turned instead to rich local materials such as jacaranda and pau ferro woods, leather, and cane. Often these elements were integrated into spare, even brutalist interiors, but Birman was keen to create a very different look in his home. “I wanted more refinement, something more decorated,” says the designer, who lives with his partner and three daughters. “Putting my flat together was kind of like a chemistry project.”