Thalita
Sardenberg

A twenty-seat café in an old fishing-village storefront, imagined for the shoulder season. The design leans into what the light already does — long shadows through the linen blinds, terracotta cool underfoot, wood warming as the day goes on.

Materials are all local and forgiving: pastis-brown timber tables that will scratch on purpose, hand-glazed tiles, natural jute rugs. The bar is a single block of stone; the chairs, rush-seated and cheap enough to replace.

A 120 m² apartment for a family that returns to Brazil each December — the brief was to design a home that feels like arriving, not staying. Big plants, walnut floors, brass edges, and a lot of natural cotton to make peace with humidity.

The living room is built around one custom bench along the window that becomes a nap spot, a reading corner, and, occasionally, a stage. Everything else in the room can move.

A three-bedroom home for a couple who wanted, in their own words, “nothing to compete with what's outside the window.” The response is almost embarrassingly restrained: white oak throughout, linen curtains that fall to the floor, one dark iron pendant per room.

The kitchen is a single line along one wall. No island, no bar, no drama. The dining table is the heaviest thing in the house and it sits under the only pendant that gets to be theatrical.

A 60 m² photography studio in a converted shipbuilding hall on the north bank of the IJ. The programme is a single working room, a coffee corner, and a small print archive.

The move here is not to fight the shell. Concrete stays concrete. The added elements — a long birch plywood counter, a burnt-orange curtain that closes off the archive, three matte-black task lights — feel like they were dropped in for the week and might leave with the photographer.