Palma di Montechiaro

History

Palma di Montechiaro dates from 1974 and was born of a falling-out. In the 1970s Hindii — Hindi Cia. Brasileira de Habitações, run by the architect and businessman Anuar Hindii — was São Paulo’s leading benchmark for construction quality for the middle class, and for that very reason a group of twenty friends who had bought a plot on Alameda Francai refused to hire the firm: they said Hindi wasn’t a luxury-building outfit. On hearing this, Anuar Hindi bought a plot on Rua Rio de Janeiro, in Higienópolis, and put up a building far more luxurious than the friends’ one — and, with their project still under construction, invited all twenty to the launch cocktail party for his. The episode is recorded in the academic study that examined the company’s output between 1967 and 1977, based on the testimony of one of the participants and an interview with Hindi himself.

• Concept: the luxury counterpoint within a company of standardised projects — one floor, one family, four suites.
• Curiosities: of the entire sample surveyed of Hindi’s output in the period, Palma di Montechiaro is the only development with one apartment per floor. It was also one of the company’s first with four bedrooms, a typology the firm only began offering in the second half of the 1970s. And the name comes from Sicily: Palma di Montechiaro is the town of the Tomasi di Lampedusa family, the same family behind The Leopard.

Architecture and aesthetics

The building belongs to the period in which Hindi swapped the façade that had made it recognisable — coloured tiles and sliding shutters, a play of shapes and colours with strong visual appeal — for the more ornamented repertoire and the painted mass that the high-end market was calling for at that moment. It is this change of skin that Palma di Montechiaro documents: the company’s construction standard, with the vocabulary of the 1970s luxury building. Inside, the logic is that of the full floor — a hall serving a single family, a continuous social area and a balcony facing the greenery of the surroundings, with a panoramic view over the tree-lined Pacaembui valley. Fifty years on, several units have undergone complete refurbishments signed by contemporary studios, and there are flats in the building that have preserved the original architecture from the time of construction. The authorship of the architectural project is not verifiably documented and is therefore not attributed here.

Aesthetics and scarcity

Technical specifications

• Towers and units: 1 tower, 1 apartment per floor. The number of floors is not publicly documented.
• Floor areas: 473 to 500 m² in the layouts in circulation, with 4 bedrooms, all en suite — one master with dressing room, two American-style suites and one simple suite. There are refurbished units on record with up to 545 m².
• Parking spaces: 4 per unit.
• Structural highlights: private floor hall per family · balcony with a permanent view over the greenery · two staff quarters in the original layout · separate dining room and breakfast room.
• Registry and parameters: 1 tower · 1 apartment per floor · 4 bedrooms · 4 suites · 4 parking spaces · private areas of 473 m² to 500 m² · built in 1974.

Location and surroundings

Points of interest · distances in metres

Higienópolis: the address

Higienópolisi was the first planned neighbourhood in São Paulo to be built with complete water and sewage systems — hence the name — and it has never stopped being the address of those who traded plot size for cultural density. It is where the townhouses of the early twentieth century coexist with the landmarks of Brazilian modern architecture: the Edifício Prudênciai, by Rino Levii, with landscaping and tiles by Roberto Burle Marxi; the Edifício Louveirai, by Vilanova Artigasi; the listed Edifício Bretagnei. Rua Rio de Janeiro is one of the most sought-after streets in this cluster, running down towards the Pacaembui valley and concentrating large buildings from a generation that is no longer built. Nearby are Praça Vilaboimi, Mackenziei, Avenida Paulistai a few minutes away, and a range of schools, hospitals and theatres that no new neighbourhood has managed to replicate.