Melo Alves 645

History

Melo Alves 645 is MOSi‘s first development in São Paulo, launched in 2021. The firm was born from an unusual arrangement in the São Paulo market: three partners, two of them architects — Manoel Maia and Matheus Farah Leal — and a business manager, Eduardo Andrade de Carvalho. Instead of developing first and hiring architecture afterwards, MOS put the design at the centre of the operation. “We look at development from the point of view of architecture,” says Manoel Maia. “It’s not that we develop and then have a concern with architecture afterwards. That’s something that comes from within us.”

The building’s driving idea is a tribute to the Atlantic Forest in the middle of the Jardinsi. All the planted species are native to the biome — the yellow jaboticaba tree, the silver palm and the philodendron among them —, and the vegetation isn’t confined to the ground floor: it occupies the balconies of every storey and descends the façade like a veil. The building’s two typologies are named after species from the same biome, Embaúba and Guaimbê.

• Concept: the building as a fragment of Atlantic Forest — native vegetation on the balconies and the façade, and a ground floor with no wall or railings, given over to the pavement.
• Trivia: the entrance hall functions as a private art gallery. The curation is by Cristina Candeloro, who invited three Brazilian artists — Felipe Cohen, Ana Mazzei and Renato Rios — to create sculpture, installation and painting exclusively for the address.

Architecture and aesthetics

The façade is the argument. With no wall and no railings, the building presents itself to the street through vegetation: the ground floor is an open garden, and the greenery keeps climbing up the wide balconies of every storey until it forms the veil that gives the volume its identity. It’s a solution that reverses the usual gesture of São Paulo high-end living, which tends to resolve the arrival through a closed lobby and a blind setback.

There are two apartments per floor, each with an individual passenger lift and private lobby — which in practice delivers an exclusive arrival without the cost of a single unit per floor slab. The floor plans are flexible by design, with several possible configurations from the same structure, catering to everything from a single resident to a large family arrangement. The leisure facilities go up: they sit on the rooftop and the two highest storeys, with a pool, sun deck, gym, dry and wet saunas, massage room, beach area and equipped spa.

Aesthetics and scarcity

Technical specifications

• Towers and units: 1 tower, 2 apartments per floor. Two typologies, named Embaúba and Guaimbê. ⚠️ The number of storeys diverges between the developer’s own sources (see dossier) and for that reason is not fixed here; the total number of units is not published.
• Floor areas: from 134 to 394 m², with 2 or 3 suites, and several floor-plan customisation options on the same structure.
• Parking spaces: not declared in an official source.
• Structural differentials: 1,549 m² plot · individual passenger lift with private lobby per apartment · balconies planted with native Atlantic Forest species · ground floor with no wall or railings · art gallery in the lobby with commissioned works · leisure facilities on the rooftop and the two highest storeys.
• Registry and parameters: plot 1,549 m² · tax lot 013.034.0822 · zoning ZEU · registry jurisdiction 13º Registro de Imóveis de São Pauloi.

Leisure and facilities

• Rooftop pool
• Sun deck
• Gym
• Dry and wet sauna
• Massage room
• Covered rest terrace
• Beach area
• Equipped spa
• Art gallery in the entrance hall

Location and surroundings

Points of interest · distances in metres

Jardim América: the address

Two names for the same address

The lot sits on the border between Jardim América and Cerqueira César, and both names are legitimate. The postcode registers Cerqueira César; the high-end market treats the address as Jardim América. This page adopts the name in common use and keeps the other on file for anyone searching by it.

The stretch of Rua Doutor Melo Alves between Oscar Freirei and Estados Unidosi is one of the most sought-after blocks of Jardim Américai — and one of the quietest. The street has no commercial vocation: the designer retail is one block up, on Oscar Freire, and what remains here is residents’ traffic, a leafy pavement and a sequence of high-end residential buildings raised over six decades. On Melo Alves itself operate well-established restaurants, such as Le Jazz and Ristorantino, and the metro network is a few minutes’ walk away via the Avenida Paulistai axis. It’s the kind of address where walking solves almost everything — and where there is practically no land left to build on.