CASA ÂMAGO || A Biophilic Retreat That Teaches Balance Through Nature at CASACOR Santa Catarina 2026
In a 90-square-metre installation for CASACOR Santa Catarina 2026, architect Mariana Maisonnave asks what it might feel like to live inside a pause.
Casa ÂMAGO, her sixth participation in the exhibition, is a biophilic interior built around this year's theme, Mind and Heart, and it treats slowness as a design material in its own right.
The project unfolds as a sequence of living, sleeping and bathing spaces, connected rather than divided, so that greenery, light and material carry through each room instead of stopping at a threshold. Abundant daylight and soft indirect lighting settle over natural stone, wood, linen and cotton, and the effect is less a display of biophilic design than a quiet argument for it: that comfort and mindfulness can be structural decisions, not finishing touches.
A curved bouclé sofa and Vestígios stone-clad shelving anchor a living space where greenery does as much design work as furniture.
Sustainability here extends well past the plant count. Passive strategies draw in daylight and reduce energy demand, while a bespoke collection called Vestígios, meaning "traces," turns offcuts of Egyptian stone originally destined for the living room walls into shelving units and coffee tables. What might have become construction waste becomes furniture with a memory attached. The bathroom vanity carries the same logic, resting on a reclaimed tree trunk that keeps its bark and irregularity intact rather than smoothing them away.
Materiality does the emotional work throughout. Tauari wood veneer wraps both floor and ceiling, Mosarte's Origem travertine collection covers the bed's headboard in a fine mosaic, and Coral's newly launched Granos coating gives the ceiling the texture of natural stone without its weight. Ceramic planters by Nina Martinelli hold the greenery that threads through every space.
Dense planting softens every threshold in the space.
A freestanding tub sits beside a vanity built on a reclaimed tree trunk, its bark left intact as a quiet argument for reuse.
The furniture selection pairs international design history with contemporary Brazilian craft. Hans Wegner's Flag Halyard Chair, draped here in sheepskin, sits near a new sofa from Brazilian manufacturer Reveev, Rafael Oliva's Guamá, and the Nonna armchair by Roberta Banqueri. A bed by Bruno Faucz anchors the sleeping area, while a sculptural console carved from reclaimed wood by Residual continues the project's reuse ethos into a standalone art object.
Mosarte's travertine mosaic headboard frames Hans Wegner's sheepskin-draped Flag Halyard Chair, old craft and modern design icon sharing one corner.
Art extends the room's contemplative register. Paulo Gaiad's 1999 painting Paisagem, Costa da Lagoa, on loan from the Santa Catarina Museum of Art, directly addresses landscape and memory. Four works from Camila Saavedra's Cura series, meaning "healing," bring subtle texture and monochrome restraint, and a print of Lake Como closes the loop on the project's quiet, reflective mood.
Paulo Gaiad's 1999 painting Paisagem, Costa da Lagoa, anchors the living space.
Casa ÂMAGO does not ask visitors to admire it so much as to slow down inside it, to notice how a headboard, a tree trunk or a shaft of daylight can hold as much meaning as any grand gesture. In doing so, Maisonnave makes a case that architecture's real work is not decoration but attention, and that a room built with enough care can teach the people in it how to rest.
The full sequence of sleeping and living spaces reveals itself in one frame, greenery and daylight carrying the eye from bed to hearth.
PROJECT DETAILS
Architect: Mariana Maisonnave (@marianamaisonnave.arq)
Photography: Cristiano Bauce (@cbauce)
Exhibition: CASACOR Santa Catarina 2026
Location: Balneário Camboriú, Santa Catarina, Brazil
Size: 90 square metres
