Edifício Itahy is the most photographed Art Deco doorway in Copacabana. Built in 1932 at the Leme end of Avenida Nossa Senhora de Copacabana, it is one of three sibling buildings — Itahy, Itaoca, Guahy — that took Brazilian Art Deco and worked native marajoara motifs into it. The name means 'small stone' in Tupi. The 1935 entrance carries a carved mermaid and a hall floor patterned like ocean waves; Rio's Art Deco walking tours stop here.
For a buyer, Itahy is the cheapest way into a documented landmark in this directory. Units start at 72 m² and run up to large combined plates; asking prices sit around R$ 11,000 – 13,000 per m² — roughly half the rate of the beachfront two blocks away. The Prado Júnior corridor location is dense, commercial and four minutes from the sand at Posto 1.
AddressAv. Nossa Senhora de Copacabana 252, Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro — 22020-001
Distance to
What's around it.
Walk and drive times to the things that decide where you live in Rio — beach,
metro, airports, neighborhood anchors.
Praia de Copacabana · Posto 14 min walk
Metrô Cardeal Arcoverde (L1)5 min walk
Santos Dumont Airport13 min by car
Galeão (GIG) International28 min by car
Cervantes (Prado Júnior)2 min walk
Morro do Leme · Forte Duque de Caxias15 min walk
On the map
Edifício Itahy located.
Av. Nossa Senhora de Copacabana 252, Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro — 22020-001
Built in 1932 by the São Paulo-born architect Arnaldo Gladosch, with construction by Scott & Urner. Gladosch worked in the first wave of Brazilian Art Deco, when architects were deliberately replacing imported French ornament with marajoara ceramics motifs from the Amazon.
Obras na praia de Copacabana · Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
The portal came three years after the building: in 1935 the painter and sculptor Pedro Luiz Correia de Araújo delivered the dark-haired mermaid above the entrance and the wave-patterned hall floor. The door, not the building, is what put Itahy in the architecture books.
Obras na praia de Copacabana 2 · Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
The building has run as a single residential building with 24-hour portaria ever since. The surrounding blocks turned commercial in the 1960s and 70s; Itahy kept its original facade and entrance intact through all of it.
Vista de Copacabana · Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
Rental yield · short-stay
What a unit earns.
Typical 1–2BR unit. The low entry price against Copacabana nightly rates makes Itahy one of the strongest gross yields in this directory; the Art Deco entrance photographs well on listings.
Nightly rateR$ 380 – R$ 850Low → high season
Avg occupancy81%12-month average
Gross yield9.0%On purchase price
Indicative estimates based on comparable short-stay units — not a guarantee of income or occupancy. Actual returns vary with unit, season and management.
Who's lived here
Notable residents.
Where named individuals declined attribution, we describe the owner profile.
No address-level identification of current residents.
Original-era professional families
A long tail of multi-decade ownership in the larger front units; the building's fame rests on its architecture rather than any single name.
Available now
No active units. For the moment.
We currently have no listings inside Edifício Itahy. Inventory in this
building moves rarely and often off-portal. Tell us you're watching it —
we'll come to you the moment a unit becomes available.
We work Copacabana block by block. Most of what we close inside
buildings like this never reaches a portal — send us your brief and we'll come back
with what's actually available.
