Paola Lenti's São Paulo flagship wears a growing veil of vines over glass

The Italian outdoor-furniture brand's color-rich, fiber-woven pieces needed a showroom that frames them rather than competes with them, on a tight site hemmed in by neighbors.

A glass flagship veiled in tensioned steel cables planted with vines — a deliberately unfinished living filter that grows denser over time.

An independent metal structure and open floor plan keep the interior fluid; cables span the structural openings as trellis for cascading vines over the glass envelope; matte-black stairs read as graphic interventions against the foliage.

The studio deliberately waited to photograph the building until the vines began performing its architectural role; the veil keeps growing and filtering daylight. No commercial figures are recorded.

For the Italian outdoor-furniture brand Paola Lenti — represented in Brazil by Casual Móveis — architecture studio Armentano Arquitetura (AARQ) built a three-story, 8,100-square-foot flagship in São Paulo's Jardins district designed to recede: an independent metal structure, matte-black staircases, and a glass envelope kept visually open so the brand's color-rich, tactile furniture carries the space.

The defining gesture is the planted facade. Tensioned steel cables span the structural openings and act as a trellis for vines that cascade down across the glass, filtering daylight and giving the transparent building privacy on a compact urban site surrounded by neighboring buildings. AARQ conceived the veil as deliberately unfinished — the planting is meant to keep growing into a denser screen — and the studio waited to document the project until the vegetation began its architectural role, making slow growth part of the work's meaning.

AARQ partner João Armentano describes the studio's role as framing the objects, not competing with them; the steel cables appeared in early studies and the planting came later, evolving with the decision to use glass — a botanical translation of Paola Lenti's engineered, woven-fiber design language.

AARQ's stated role was to frame, not compete with, objects whose vivid woven surfaces are the brand — so the building stays dark, structural and quiet.

On a tight urban plot, glass was the unobvious choice; the growing plants gave the transparency both privacy and softness.

The facade's deliberate incompleteness turns time into part of the design: the building is documented and understood as perpetually unfinished.

A frame can be the idea: build the container to recede — and even keep growing — and let the product carry the identity.

Design Milk's October 2026 feature documents the building in its early, still-unfinished state, with photography released only after the plants started doing architectural work. The facade is expected to keep densifying; no store performance figures are recorded in the material.