São Paulo-born filmmaker Alejandro Landes recently flexed his design muscles in a big way. In Miami's Coconut Grove neighborhood, overlooking the picturesque Key Biscayne, Landes built his first design: Casa Bahia, a 20,000-square-foot concrete villa that recalls the bold gestures of Brazilian modernism. "Drama" captures the home from its soaring, expansive balconies to the gravity-defying suspended staircase at the entrance, to the numerous floor-to-ceiling hurricane-proof windows that blur the line between the minimalist interiors and the lush topical landscape.
"My mother went to architecture school in São Paulo at the time right after Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa had built Brasilia, and that fabulous kind of tropical modernism experience, so I grew up with that aesthetic," Landes tells Wallpaper. At the same time, Landes also drew inspiration from the work of minimalist sculptor Richard Serra and artist Mark Rothko. "There's this certain spiritual density to them with their simplicity," he says of Rothko's paintings.