Leo Laniado

Lasar Segall’s sculpture The Three Graces seems to walk hand in hand toward the pool, where cobalt-blue glass mosaic tiles intensify reflections on the surface of the water.

The front door of the house, crafted from the Brazilian hardwood ipe, is addressed simply with an azalea, pruned for weight and balance, and the arched limbs of a tropical Delonix regia.

A chaise longue and a wood-and-glass side table by the internationally acclaimed Brazilian designer Hugo França are placed under the pergola, from where one can see the pool and then the terrace built alongside the house. The lustrous leaves of a philodendron thrive in the shade underneath a Moroccan-made chandelier.

Brazilian garden maker Leo Laniado and architect Isay Weinfeld collaborated to create a dramatic contemporary house and garden in constant play with each other. In the side yard, this led to the placement of a tropical Calliandra haematocephala and a saw-tooth-shaped stairway that angles along the wall of the house to a rooftop garden, each at equal distance from a ceramic pyramid by Japanese sculptor Nobuo Mitsunashi. 

The pergola at the back of the garden is lushly draped with a combination of vines, including bower vine (Pandorea jasminoides), jasmine (Jasminum rex) and shower orchid (Congea tomentosa). The curve of a Hugo França bench, made from a fallen yellow pequi tree, is echoed in the pruned shapes of the nearby azaleas.

Brazilian garden maker Leo Laniado

The evergreen tropical vine Congea tomentosa smothers the terrace’s roof and columns with a magnificent display of pink bracts. During São Paulo’s rainy season that begins in late spring and during the cold of winter, the terrace can be enclosed by awnings.

For the most part protected from the vagaries of weather, the terrace is well dressed in chic interior furnishings and container plants, including this Ficus benjamina set into a tin pot.

The rooftop garden reached from indoors and by the exterior stairs sports a view of the São Paulo cityscape beyond. The Hugo França chair carved from yellow pequi reiterates the spherical shapes of the evergreen azaleas, Calliandra haematocephala ‘Alba’, and boxwood, as does the stainless-steel mobile by Brazilian sculptor Cleber Machado.

Silvana Tinelli introduced follies in the ancient Greek style to her garden.

A sculpture of a man seemingly humbled by nature, by the Switzerland-born Brazilian Florian Raiss, is stationed alone on the terrace, where between inside and out visitors look onto the garden, the pool and the pergola beyond.

As its highest bidder, Silvana Tinelli took this prized cow home after it was displayed and auctioned for charity at the 2005 CowParade in São Paulo. Made by Regina Silveira from synthetic carpet wrapped around a fiberglass frame, it now peacefully grazes under the pergola at the Tinelli home.

“The end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time,” quotes Laniado, who likes to conjure up T.S. Eliot when discussing his gardens. Playing off the humorous and yet essential relationships between man, nature and art, this classical torso with missing arms and head found its place in the Tinelli garden below the leafless, armlike branches of an ipe-amarelo tree (Tabebuia alba).

Laniado first saw Segall’s sculpture The Three Graces on exhibit at the São Paulo Biennal in the late 1990s and used it shortly thereafter in the design of the Tinelli garden. A bracing close-up of the sculpture’s three faces restates the monumentality of the piece, and repeats the themes of the sphere and the trinity that frequent the garden.

The double chaises and the curve of the pruned azalea echo the shape of the reflecting pool.

Marking the epicenter of the ground around it, the pyramid brings out the genius of place.

The volumes, colors and shapes of the side yard are repeated in the Moroccan oil jugs planted with pruned azaleas in the back garden.