Casa MAGMA

Casa MAGMA is an ephemeral interior built for the Portinari brand at CASACOR São Paulo 2026, the largest design showcase in the Americas. Conceived by SUITE, the São Paulo studio led by Carolina Mauro, Daniela Frugiuele, Luiza Monari and Filipe Troncon, the 215-square-meter space responds to the edition's theme, "Mind and Heart," read against a culture of collective burnout. Rather than illustrate the theme, SUITE chose to build its antidote: a house that addresses the body before it addresses reason, designed to be felt before it is understood.

The name comes from matter itself. Magma is the incandescent core beneath the earth's crust, the substance that shapes a landscape slowly, over time. That image organized every decision: an earthy palette, walls built up like geological strata, and a plan with a warm center that dissolves toward its edges. It also gave the project its governing gesture. In the existing space, the floor sat forty centimeters too low and the window sills were uncomfortably high, cutting the room off from the garden. SUITE raised the entire level to meet the windows, opening the perimeter to daylight and greenery, then carved the center back down into a sunken living room. The result is a house you read through your feet: a lucid, bright edge and a lower, warmer core, with the ground dropping away as you reach the middle. The mind lives at the perimeter; the heart, one step below.

The journey is built on compression and release. Visitors enter through a dark, dense hall of reddish tones and burgundy velvet, unable to see where they are going, because a large curved wall conceals the space beyond. That wall was the project's first drawing, its initial reference the concrete sculptures of Richard Serra, planes that shape space by curving through it rather than enclosing it. Clad in Portinari's Vestígios Decor Mix, fluted and mineral, it guides the visitor into the central room and then continues around it. From this nucleus, every function unfolds without doors: living, dining, tea bar, master suite and bathing room flow into one another as a single continuous space.

Portinari's surfaces run through the entire architecture as one continuous skin. Argilas porcelain covers the floor of the central core, translating tones drawn from the Brazilian coast, forest and cerrado. Petra sintered stone, ordinarily a finish, was taken to a marble workshop and re-worked as raw matter: fluted for the bathing room, and cut into tubes for the sculptural pendant suspended over the kitchen island, a piece SUITE designed with natural crystals. The material stops being a surface and becomes structure, then object. Duratex wood reinforces the enveloping, cocoon-like atmosphere throughout.

What makes Casa MAGMA singular is that it gathers, in one architecture, more than a decade of SUITE's own furniture. Over 90% of the pieces are the studio's design, and they were not made for this house. The Lina and Céu armchairs date from 2015; the Ondas rug from 2023; the Nazca and Scotia stools from 2024; the Cascata pendant from 2025; the Magma sofa and Casulo bed were drawn this year; and the In.verso tables, in recycled plastic pigmented with clay and set against offcuts of natural stone, were shown at SP-Arte only weeks before the house opened. Placing pieces made ten years apart in a single room is a deliberate test. If they competed, the work was never coherent; because they sit together, the studio's through-line becomes visible.

The art was curated on the same terms, chosen for works already speaking about sediment, fragment and the memory held in matter rather than for works that matched the palette. Luiz Eduardo Rayol's framed fragments read as geological specimens in the entrance hall; Carolina Colichio's ceramics sit by the fireplace; Aline Moreno, Mano Penalva and a white relief by Zanini de Zanine, fixed to the raw original column, extend the mineral field. Against it stand two figurative counterparts, a 1947 Diego Rivera drawing beside the kitchen and an antique bronze of a boy by Odoardo Tabacchi on a bed of moss and ferns, carrying the human warmth the theme demanded. Nothing is hierarchized by provenance.

Architecture, furniture and art are treated as three scales of a single intention. Casa MAGMA is where they finally meet: a contemporary shelter that invites the visitor to slow down, sit, and feel the silent power held in matter, light and texture.