Sunset Place

History

Sunset Place is a 2002 building, from the vintage in which upper Vila Madalenai traded the townhouse for the large-footprint building without turning into a high-rise neighbourhood. It was built on a 1,020 m² plot on Rua Isabel de Castela, with one unit per floor plate and full leisure facilities in the base. The design authorship, builder and developer do not appear in any verifiable public source and, for that reason, are not attributed here.

• Concept: one apartment per floor on a thousand-square-metre plot — the floor plan occupies the entire slab, and the leisure area fits underneath because the tower is narrow and tall.
• Curiosities: a building called Sunset Place sits a few minutes’ walk from the square where all of São Paulo goes to watch the sunset — Praça Pôr do Soli, in Alto de Pinheirosi — and less than a block from Praça Panamericana. The building is also one of those that make Isabel de Castela, in practice, a street of large condominiums: the same stretch holds Solar de Castela (321), Torres de Castela (330), The Cup (470), Domani (540) and Panamericana (580), several of them with their own postcode at the Post Office.

Architecture and aesthetics

A narrow, tall slab over a wide base. The base occupies 641 m² of the plot at three metres in height — it is the leisure and parking floor, covering most of the plot; the tower rises from there with a 14.8-by-23.4-metre footprint, just 308 m² of projection, up to 67.56 metres in height. It is the siting that solves the product without a party wall: with a single apartment per floor and a 308 m² slab for a 257 m² floor plan, there is no neighbour on the same landing, no ventilation shaft and no shared wall, and the living room can open onto more than one orientation. The standard units have a living room for three settings with an integrated balcony, a home theatre room, a guest toilet, four bedrooms with three en-suites — the main one with a walk-in closet — and full staff quarters.

Aesthetics and scarcity

Technical specifications

• Towers and units: 1 tower, 1 apartment per floor.
• Floor areas: 257 m² in the standard floor plan, with 4 bedrooms and 3 en-suites; the records in circulation list units from 257 to 520 m², the largest corresponding to roughly two standard floors.
• Parking: 4 spaces.
• Structural features: 1,020 m² plot; 67.56 m tower with a projection of just 308 m² over a 641 m² base; living room for three settings with integrated balcony; home theatre room; full staff quarters.
• Registry and parameters: tax plot of 1,020 m² · 1 tower · 1 apartment per floor · 4 bedrooms · 3 en-suites · 4 parking spaces · private areas from 257 to 520 m² · building height 67.56 m · tower projection 308 m² · completed 2002 · registry jurisdiction 10º Registro de Imóveis de São Pauloi (Vila Madalena subdistrict) · zoning ZM, Law 16.402/2016.

Leisure and facilities

• Multi-sports court
• Uncovered adult swimming pool
• Children’s pool
• Gym / fitness room
• Sauna
• Function room
• Garden

Location and surroundings

Points of interest · distances in metres

Vila Madalena: the address

Rua Isabel de Castela sits in the part of Vila Madalenai that almost no one associates with the neighbourhood’s bars: it is the high, residential, leafy stretch that borders Alto de Pinheirosi, where the streets climb, the shops disappear and what is left are residents. Praça Pôr do Soli is a few minutes’ walk away, bringing with it the open horizon over the city that gives the São Paulo sunset its name; Praça Panamericana, less than a block away, serves as the neighbourhood square. From the address it is a few minutes down to the life of Vila Madalenai and to Estação Vila Madalenai, and a short drive to Avenida Brigadeiro Faria Limai and Parque Villa-Lobosi without leaving local streets. It is one of the few areas of the west side where a large floor area coexists with a quiet street and tall trees.