Casa Modernista

This guide to Casa Modernista in São Paulo centers on the garden Mina Klabin designed behind the radical new house she built with architect Gregori Warchavchik in 1928, a house the papers called foreign and cold. Fashionable São Paulo gardens were meant to be admired from a veranda, never touched, but Klabin's plans included a hand-dug pool, a patch of trucked-in sand, and a volleyball court. Surviving blueprints for the property list them beside a dollhouse, a kennel and a chicken coop, plain as a set of chores. The same thirteen thousand square meters of garden still spreads out around you today.