When we started the project of Casa Natura Santo André, we came from an earlier experience of five projects of Casas Natura in São Paulo (Rua Vergueiro, Av. Santo Amaro, Itaquera, Osasco and Guarulhos). These are places dedicated to the contact with the sales force of the largest Brazilian cosmetics company, which has about one million direct sales consultants in Brazil.
With a 20% increase in the number of consultants in relation to 2009, the intention of the company is to create a place of physical relationship with these people. They are places where monthly launching events take place, with an intense schedule of training and lectures for consultants, as well as being always open for visitation by the general public. Because they are not a showroom or a store (products are not marketed in these places), the buildings became known as Casas Natura; The idea is that these spaces are places where the consultants feel sheltered and welcomed like in a house. Therefore, the houses are an initiative to inform and encourage the consultants, who will additionally have the opportunity to test and try the products that normally only sell by catalog. In addition, Natura is a brand that is founded on stimulating the relationship between people. More than an auditorium and a show-room, the idea was to create a pleasant space where people want to attend, meet and exchange experiences.
With a larger size than the new Casa Natura Santo André, the former were renovations and contained a similar program: auditoriums for sales force training; Area of exposure and experimentation of products; Coffee lounge and administrative area. However, because they were reform, they consumed a great deal of effort from the companies involved - from the communications and branding office, Epigram, from São Paulo, and from the FGMF office, partners in the project. After all, reforming five different real estate has become a difficult, expensive and inefficient task. Because of Natura's interest in deploying Homes throughout Brazil, we proposed a different strategy for the company's commercial innovation team: making them smaller and prefabricated in order to optimize the project, maintaining greater control over the costs of Construction and streamline its implementation. In addition, it would be a more appropriate way to achieve, through a certified project, the assumptions of environmental responsibility requested by the client. To illustrate this possibility, we presented to Natura the project developed by the FGMF for the final of the international competition 'Living Steel 2008', where we proposed a metallic construction with high ambient performance and flexibility to suit different seasons of the year.
Generous spaces, despite the smaller size. Natural lighting and contact with the garden. Dry and efficient construction. Environmental certification. Possibility of replication and customization according to the local situation. An object outlined by its voids and the relationship between inside and outside. These premises gave rise to the Santo André project, which was conceived and built as a pilot for future replications. As an industrialized object, after the construction of the prototype will be made a balance of the whole process of design, construction and operation of the House to adjust from the program to the typical detailing before building new units.
It was researched and chosen a typical land of the central areas of the Brazilian cities determined by Natura: a plot of 250m², with 10m of front, that became our minimum module of land.
On it, the construction is marked by a metallic skeleton that is arranged longitudinally, reserving to the front portion a great open retreat for the city in the form of garden.
This skeleton can be implanted in other ways in different batches: it can be mirrored according to the convenience of visibility or access, it can have the front inverted in the case of a wider lot or corner, etc. But, fundamentally, the function of this skeleton is to articulate the other elements of the set and to create a heterogenous object that defines constructed areas of different qualities, open and closed.
Tucked into the skeleton, a large box accommodates the main program: two flexible auditoriums, where the 'consultants' meet and where frequent training takes place. Closer, it allows the correct lighting control necessary and configures a large drop box, with swings that detach it from the structure. At the bottom of the lot, the naturally reserved functions are contained by another, more upright box: toilets, storage, cupboard and administration are part of that block.
From the street, one can see through the garden the backward construction, which gains perspective. The structure announces a diaphanous front portion that skirts the vegetation with white beams and shading elements. Soon after, the massive box of the auditorium goes beyond the limits of the skeleton and imposes itself as the most imposing element of the ensemble. Under the weight of the auditorium, a flowing ground floor is spilled, which does not find in the windows of the exhibition area a clear boundary between the external and internal spaces.
The side swing of the auditorium offers a covered walkway for visitors who finally enter the exhibition area and experimentation of the brand's products. Here the construction seems to disappear, leaving in the visitor's visual range only the products and the garden that surrounds them. Only after passing through the products do we have access to the glass door that leads us to a central atrium.
Amazingly, this space is empty, open, semi-covered, undefined. At the same time, it is an element full of possibilities, where all the horizontal and vertical circulation of the House is given. It is also an area for meeting and socializing in the midst of vegetation, where coffee occupies a strategic position coupled with the structure of the staircase. Going up this ladder, one arrives at the auditoriums and, crossing the catwalk, one reaches the administration.
It is, in fact, a very simple object, where the identification of the program is facilitated by the highlighting of readable objects coupled with the omnipresent and continuous structure that transcends the traditional limits of construction and the nature that surrounds it. So we thought it should be the face of the Natura brand: simple, precise and in direct contact with nature.
