Location: São Paulo, Brazil

Design Team: ARCHITECTS OFFICE

Area: 40 m²

Completion: 2026

Category: Commercial Architecture, Bookshop

Lead Architect: Greg Bousquet

Photography: Felco

Design Features: Livraria da Vila Artes is a 40 m² bookshop inside MorumbiShopping in São Paulo, designed by ARCHITECTS OFFICE. Rather than competing with the mall's constant movement through an accumulation of displays, the project creates a deliberate pause. A restrained off-white volume frames the shop from outside, while the cut-out entrance reveals a saturated blue interior and rows of illuminated books. Passing, stopping and entering become three clearly distinct moments.

A fast-track construction programme pushed each decision toward precision. The plan follows the shop's irregular wedge-shaped boundary, placing shelving around the perimeter to release the centre for a small number of freestanding displays. Shelves, floor, ceiling and furniture belong to one chromatic system, while services and construction recede from view. The compact interior is therefore read as a continuous field rather than a collection of separate retail fixtures.

The blue takes inspiration from Yves Klein's exploration of colour as a sensory, perceptual and spiritual field. It is not a decorative backdrop applied to the walls; it extends across floor, shelving and ceiling, absorbing edges and unsettling the apparent scale of the room. Covers, paper and printed images become the most vivid elements in the space. Books on art, fashion, architecture and gastronomy are treated less as stock on shelves than as objects to be curated and closely observed.

A central stretched ceiling light produces an even, diffuse glow, concealing technical infrastructure while giving the deep-blue room a legible luminous centre. Linear lighting runs through the perimeter shelving and gently lifts each cover from its background. At the threshold, the mall's pale timber floor gives way abruptly to blue, lending the act of entry something of a gallery ritual. With very few materials and components, the design builds an order through brightness, colour and viewing distance.

The project continues almost a decade of collaboration between Livraria da Vila and ARCHITECTS OFFICE, an architectural idea now developed across 18 locations. Where a conventional bookshop might foreground quantity and classification, Livraria da Vila Artes asks how a book first catches the eye and how perception precedes reading. Within the flow of the mall, architecture and display condense into an intense blue interval, returning books from everyday merchandise to cultural objects worth approaching, opening and remembering.

Design Team: ARCHITECTS OFFICE is an international architecture, urbanism and interior design practice founded in 2021 by French architect Greg Bousquet and based in Brazil. Bousquet trained at the École Nationale d'Architecture de Paris-La Seine, completed postgraduate study in architectural theory and design at ENSA Paris-La Villette, and studied philosophy and contemporary art at Sorbonne University. Before establishing ARCHITECTS OFFICE, he co-founded Triptyque Architecture and built a practice spanning more than two decades and projects across several countries.

The office works between global experience and local context, technical precision and artistic judgement, urban life and nature. Its collaborative, multicultural structure approaches architecture, interiors and the city as connected scales, grounding design in material use, spatial efficiency and environmental responsibility. Proportion, human scale, natural materials and careful detailing carry broader ideas into everyday experience rather than allowing form to become detached from use.

The practice now brings together around 110 professionals. Alongside its Brazilian base, architects in Portugal, Spain and Italy contribute to an international body of work extending across numerous Brazilian states as well as Peru, Chile and Portugal. Led by Greg Bousquet, Livraria da Vila Artes forms part of the studio's long collaboration with Livraria da Vila, developing a repeatable yet adaptable relationship between brand identity, the experience of reading and the conditions of each commercial site.