When pharmaceutical heir Jonas Siaulys decided at the last minute to scrap a shopping mall project and build a boutique hotel instead, his architect Ruy Ohtake delivered new sketches within 48 hours. “I think he realized that the possibilities for a hotel were greater than for a mall,” says Siaulys. “And he knew that we’d give him creative freedom.” (Book a room at the Hotel Unique. For more on Brazil’s biggest city, see the BrazilMax São Paulo Travel Guide. For hotel tips, see our São Paulo Hotel Recommendations page.)
The most venerated Brazilian name in the business after Oscar Niemeyer, Ohtake produced an inverted arc. Reminiscent of a watermelon wedge, the design conveyed a sense of monumental proportions while respecting a 25-meter municipal zoning height limit. A long-time crony of Siaulys’s father Victor, Ohtake shared his young client’s desire to bestow an icon upon São Paulo, South America’s premiere metropolis and their hometown.
The external design suffered almost no alteration from then on. But Siaulys wanted more than an architectural icon. He hoped to set the local benchmark for hotel design, too. This was 1999, and Siaulys, a frequent traveler then a bit shy of 30, had just abandoned the Hiltons and Sheratons for the quirky hipness of the Mondrian and the Mercer. With all of the cosmopolitan flair of its advertising, design and fashion industries, São Paulo lacked anything to rival the designer hotels of Los Angeles, New York and Miami.
The trick would be to combine monumental architecture with whimsical design and luxurious informality. Could these seemingly irreconcilable stylistic languages be made to converse with each other?
With a few notable exceptions that Ohtake himself cites – such as Niemeyer’s characteristically wavy downtown Copan apartment complex and Lina Bo Bardi’s São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) that sits on stilts astride the Paulista Avenue business hub – São Paulo’s architectural character is most notable in its absence. Imagine 1,493 square kilometers of nondescript white box apartment buildings and generic neoclassical office towers. Stretching for 130 kilometers on its east-west axis, the city of 10 million boasts a knack for urban sprawl that inspires ironic awe among popular Brazilian musicians. “Flowers of concrete sprout” in Tom Zé’s composition “São São Paulo.” In his classic “Sampa,” Caetano Veloso sings “of the power of money that builds and destroys things beautiful.”
A boomtown transformed from a village outpost in the last century, São Paulo can be compared to Mexico City, albeit without the latter’s residual colonial charm. “São Paulo is one of the world’s biggest cities,” says Ohtake. “But it doesn’t have daring architecture.”
Born in 1938, “Master” Ohtake – as colleagues call him – is anything but timid. He stands as the intellectual successor of both Niemeyer’s Le Corbusier-tinged tropical modernism and a São Paulo school of architecture that favored function in capably servicing the city’s mid-20th century economic surge. Citing examples of his own work over the last 10 years, including the São Paulo branch of the Renaissance hotel chain and the Tomie Ohtake Institute, Ohtake admits that he wants to help endow São Paulo with an distinctive visual heritage.
The Unique emerged as a logical step in Ohtake’s quest. Some observers believe it to be part of the quest first and a lodging place second. “The Unique is a hotel by accident,” says Heloisa Proença, a former municipal planning secretary. “More than anything, it is Ruy’s building.” Some critics lampooned the wasted space at either side of the bottom of the arc, suggesting that the curved form reduces profitability by allowing cool breezes to pass for free where guests could otherwise pay to be sleeping. But the municipal building code only allows for constructed space only twice the size of the real estate. The curved structure respects that limit while allowing for 30 rooms with better views on the top 6th floor compared to just six on the panorama-challenged first. “I’m sure he saw the form first,” Siaulys admits. “But it was perfect.”
Ohtake’s audacity, at the Unique and elsewhere, doesn’t appeal to everyone. Critics have called his work excessive, even unbearable. “Exercises in form,” slams another. Ohtake remains unflappable. “Sometimes more daring work is polemical, and all vanguards are polemical,” he admits. “There’s one word I don’t like in art: consensus.”
Having Ohtake’s blessing on the hotel project helped Siaulys convince his father and other business partners that a hotel would be a good idea. But Siaulys wasn’t sure about letting the architectural heavyweight loose on the hotel’s interior. A typical Ohtake interior will favor vast communal caverns at the expense of private spaces. Ohtake probably wouldn’t come up with the sort of thing people have come to expect from concept hotel legend Philippe Starck. “Ruy is excellent when it comes to form and shape, to add entertainment to the city,” says Siaulys. “But I didn’t believe that he knew what I was talking about [when it came to design hotels].”
Even now, as the completed Hotel Unique self-consciously markets itself in the design segment, Ohtake remains cool to the concept. “It is dumb to call it a design hotel,” he says. “I call it an urban hotel.”
Siaulys wasn’t just relying on intuition when evaluating Ohtake’s interiors: he grew up in them, in a home the architect designed for Siaulys’s father in 1972. “Even though the house was huge, the bedrooms were tiny and you couldn’t even move in the bathrooms,” recalls Siaulys.
Siaulys made up his mind. “I wanted to call upon the best architect for the exterior and the best for the interior,” he explains. “I decided to get somebody else for the interior.”
Siaulys put out queries to Starck and other international names, but finally settled on up-and-coming homeboy João Armentano. Darling of Brazil’s fashionable social column set, Armentano designs the homes of youthful household-name television personalities and commercial spaces for smart health clubs and advertising agencies. Where Ohtake is a bold, controversial elder statesman, Armentano is droll, even-tempered and just on the farside of 40.
Siaulys told Ohtake of his decision. “Ruy said he was quitting,” he recalls. “He said I could take the drawings and give them to João.”
So the next day, Siaulys dropped in unannounced at Ohtake’s studio, asking for the drawings. “He told me he wasn’t quitting after all, that he was just kidding,” remembers Siaulys.
Adding landscape artist Gilberto Elkis, Siaulys now had assembled his team of luminaries. But like the Brazilian national soccer team with its wealth of talented strikers, it appeared that there might not be enough room on the field for everyone. “I wanted an all-star team, but the hardest thing was to get them to talk to each other,” says Siaulys. Eventually the young entrepreneur gave up. Adopting a novel strategy, he became their personal messenger. “I’d pick up the drawings from Ruy and take them over to João, averting physical contact,” he recalls.
Showing a preference for natural materials and whites and sandy shades, Armentano’s interiors may seem to stand a generation away from Ohtake’s exterior. Yet the style war, if there is one at the Unique, is muted. The divided duo managed to create a nearly seamless transition from the ambitious forms to a relaxed, if not precisely cozy, interior design.
It can sometimes be difficult to discern where Ohtake leaves off and Armentano takes over. “My job wasn’t to invent anything,” says Armentano. “It is almost neutral, almost transparent. I wanted to add value to the architectural lines. I didn’t want to compete with Master Ruy Ohtake’s striking architectural project.”
This is especially true in the lateral rooms, where space is circumscribed by the external arc. The wooden floors turn seamlessly into walls as they track the contours of the external structure and roll up to the ceiling. A flatscreen television is mounted irreverently mid-way up. The surface of a slick white desk extends past function to abut against the rising extremity. “I explored what I was given from the arc,” explains Armentano. “So you have the arc on the outside and on the inside.”
The Unique sits on an old vacant lot between an upscale residential district and the Parque Ibirapuera, São Paulo’s answer to Central Park. The hotel is set back from the street, astride a major thoroughfare served by countless city bus lines. With a nod to Ian Schrager of Mondrian et.al fame, there’s no external indication of what’s inside, no sign. Commuters crane their necks for a better view of the mystery building. Admittance seems a privilege. The effect is medieval-castle exclusive.
Inside guests find an ambiance of playful adventure. Requisite trip-hop musak is piped into the vast lobby. Baroque angels by sculptor Aleijadinho (1738-1814) stand guard above the bar. A hand-painted chair by Italian artist Alessandro Mendini adorns one end of the lobby. Guests enter darkened elevators and emerge to navigate undulating corridors, dazzled by light filtered through an upstairs refracting pool and down to each floor via a central shaft.
In the rooms, the bathrooms borrow a page from the driver’s manual of a Ferrari convertible. Pop open the vertically sliding divider and guests can soak in the bathtub with a full view of the bedroom and television. Pop it closed for privacy. When the time comes to go for a swim, backstrokes can be done in a slender red pool on the top floor. The sun deck offers a privileged view of São Paulo’s imposing skyline.
The high-rise buildings that compose that skyline will perhaps break the fantasy. They stand as reminders that the city primarily draws no-nonsense business travelers. So the obvious question: will there be enough hip upscale visitors to allow a property like the Unique to prosper.
When the Unique was conceptualized in 1999, demand for hotel rooms in São Paulo surpassed supply nearly threefold. In the 18 months leading up to year-end 2002, three dozen new hotels opened in the metropolitan area. The numbers flip-flopped. Supply now outruns demand by a factor of nearly three. Also since 1999, two renovated properties latched onto the design cachet in São Paulo: the Emiliano and the Pergamon. Another, the Fasano, is being built from an original design by Brazilians Isay Weinfeld and Márcio Kogan, and is scheduled to open in mid-2003.
The mini-boom in the design segment says something about São Paulo. “No other city in Latin America has the sophistication of São Paulo,” says Michel Chertouh, the French general manager for Six Continents hotel group in the city. “This is the only place in the region where design hotels could work.”
But Chertouh adds a word of caution: “There’s room here for design hotels, but it is limited because of the excess supply.”
The Unique is averaging a 30-40% occupancy rate on its 95 rooms, according Siaulys. Not great, perhaps, but better than the six percent that he hears that some of the new chain hotels are getting. “Even though the hotel industry is passing through some stormy weather in São Paulo, I feel comfortable,” says the proprietor.
The Unique could end up as a São Paulo version of Manhattan’s Mercer, attracting models, rock stars and general issue jetsetters. But Siaulys hopes for a broader mix. “With all the business people who come to São Paulo, I couldn’t help but focus on them even if I didn’t want to,” he says. So far the guest list has proven at least as challenging as the design, including everyone from Athina Onassis to briefcase warriors from Wall Street’s Morgan Stanley. Not to mention the lady who lives three blocks down and brings her dog along to indulge in travel fantasies. “I think people are still finding themselves,” says Siaulys. “The restaurant is very casual, but at the beginning people would come in their best suits.”
Like many concept hotels, the Unique trades on its ability to offer a singular yet genuinely local experience. And in São Paulo, that includes dinner jackets in the laid-back eatery and the neighbor lady’s dog in the next room. With its hyper-unreality and eclectic mix of the epic and the understated, it reflects the zeitgeist of ever-changing and ever-challenging São Paulo.
