“In Brazil, luxury is commonly used to mean imported products. The local artisans we found didn’t know many Brazilian marbles. So we made many trips to the south of the country to find these products. This country has incredible natural resources.”
Sebastien Le Pezennec’s testimony sets the tone for the Rosewood São Paulo hotel’s proposal — to show Brazil to Brazilians (and foreigners), in all its splendor.
He is an executive at EDM Brasil, a high-end French marble company that worked on the project for the hotel, part of the luxury complex Cidade Matarazzo, developed by Frenchman Alexandre Allard in the city of São Paulo.
The newly opened property is owned by Allard —51 percent owner— and Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, an international luxury hotel and resort chain that operates 28 properties in 15 countries.
The idea is to combine the concept of “sense of place” (“spirit of the place”, in a free translation) that permeates some of the chain’s main hotels, such as the Carlyle in New York, the Crillon in Paris or Las Ventanas in Mexico, to Allard’s “utopia”, as he himself has defined his epic since he bought, in 2008, for R$ 117 million, the old Umberto Primo hospital complex, in Bela Vista, in the central region.
Allard renovated the former Condessa Filomena Matarazzo maternity hospital, created in 1943 as part of the hospital complex, where nearly half a million people from São Paulo were born, to transform it into one of the spaces at Rosewood São Paulo.
Instead of the delivery rooms, suites whose daily rates start at R$ 2,800 and reach close to R$ 7,000, adorned by a collection of more than 450 works by 57 contemporary Brazilian artists.
The utopia that Allard talks about is to prove that it is possible to build something new while respecting the history of the place and, in addition, valuing nature, highlighting the remnants of the Atlantic forest on the land.
“To achieve the ‘sense of place’, it was necessary to renew the cultural and historical heritage of the place, especially maternity, a symbol of life,” he told leaf the general director of Rosewood São Paulo, Edouard Grosmangin.
The challenge, says Grosmangin, was to bring innovation and modernity to the project, with the tower designed by architect Jean Nouvel, winner of the Pritzker, a prize known as the Nobel Prize for architecture.
Nouvel’s project —which adds to the space of the old maternity hospital, inaugurated on the 15th— has a vertical garden with species from the Atlantic forest.
“It was very important for the network to bring more greenery and nature to the city,” says Grosmangin about the tower, which will be inaugurated at the end of the second half of the year.
Adding the two spaces, Rosewood São Paulo will have 160 rooms and 100 suites. The artistic direction of the hotel, the first of the chain in South America, has the signature of also Frenchman Philippe Starck, one of the most recognized designers on the planet.
The hotel also has two swimming pools, cinema, music studio, event spaces, the Asaya spa, and six restaurants.
Grosmangin estimates that Rosewood has consumed around 80% of the investment made in the Cidade Matarazzo complex, which in total represents close to R$ 3 billion.
The project included the restoration of the Santa Luzia chapel. The idea is that the nearly century-old church, reconsecrated in November, will serve as a stage for memorable weddings, with respective parties organized in the event spaces or restaurants of Cidade Matarazzo.
In the environments designed by Starck for the hotel, Brazilian woods and stones immediately draw attention — a different type for each room and each bathroom.
All work was done with raw materials and local labor. In the rooms, Jatobá, Walnut, Itauba and Sucupira are among the certified woods that line the walls. In the bathrooms, onyx, palomino quartzite, amazonite from certified deposits make up floors, bathtubs and vats.
But the idea of luxury that one wants to convey goes beyond the nobility of the materials.
Perhaps, by the way, the difference between a five-star hotel and a Rosewood, which is classified as six stars, lies in the treatment given to the raw material. It is, more or less, like the difference between “plus” and “surplus”.
At Rosewood São Paulo, this treatment came from the Ateliers de France group, a restoration network that includes EDM and which had the qualifications required to carry out what Starck wanted.
In this case, not bathtubs covered with marble slabs, but carved in entire blocks of stone, with special machinery imported for this purpose; not slatted paneling, but glossy slats that allow you to see the grain of each type of wood.
The concept of “local color” expands to commissioned artwork. Guests are welcomed by thick rugs by Regina Silveira, known for her “op” effect figures. On each floor, a different artist took charge of the hallways.
Brazilian design furniture, signed by names such as Sergio Rodrigues (1927-2014), the creator of the Mole armchair, completes the environments.
On bedside and coffee tables, books that seek to provide the visitor with an immersion in what would be the national spirit — in one of the rooms, for example, there was an anthology of Brazilian poems selected by the American writer Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), which lived in the country for 15 years.
Underneath so many layers of information, textures and colors, you can hardly remember that the building that partly houses the hotel was a maternity hospital. The single most obvious trace of this past is the sign on the façade overlooking the Jardim das Oliveiras, behind the chapel.
Restaurants evoke a past of industrial luxury
Due to its location, Rosewood São Paulo is linked to the city’s rich industrial past. The fact that the hotel’s inauguration takes place on the eve of the centenary of the Week of Modern Art, cultural materialization of this ostentation, does not go unnoticed.
Of its six gastronomic spaces, two refer directly to that moment.
One of them is Taraz, a name evocative of the surname of Count Francesco, or Francisco Matarazzo (1854-1937), an industrialist and banker who was the main contributor to the Italian society responsible for maintaining the hospital complex where the enterprise now operates.
The other is Blaise, named after the French-Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars, a figure linked to the modernist group of Tarsila do Amaral and Oswald de Andrade.
Blaise, Rabo di Galo —a pocket show bar— and Le Jardin are already up and running. Emerald Garden Pool & Bar, Belavista Rooftop Pool & Bar and Taraz will only open their doors next year.
“We have six restaurants and people think it’s great, because a big hotel has one or two,” says Edouard Grosmangin. “But they are small spaces, each with its own identity.”
Blaise is a mix of French and Swiss cuisine and is housed in the old maternity ward. In an intimate space, the restaurant features hand-drawn tiles and original woodwork.
Next to it, Le Jardin, with modern cuisine, extends from the lobby to the hotel’s gardens.
“We believe that we have to teach people in São Paulo to go to hotel restaurants,” says Grosmangin. “These are not restaurants to go once or twice a year, for an expensive meal, but on a daily basis.”
The executive believes that Cidade Matarazzo will help foreign travelers — and even Brazilians — to see the city with new eyes.
“São Paulo is much more than a business city, it is an effervescent center of art”. For the French, it’s time to rediscover the land of the drizzle.
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