Telhanorte Brand Guidelines: A 1976 São Paulo Home Centre, Saint-Gobain and Tumelero

Two partners, roof tiles and the north of the city.

Telhanorte is a São Paulo retailer of building and renovation materials. Portuguese Wikipedia and the company’s own website both date its founding to 1976, in the city of São Paulo, and Portuguese Wikipedia names its founders as Rinaldo Grecco and Lázaro Rosa.

A clear picture of the early business comes from an official document. In a technical opinion dated 3 July 2001, Brazil’s Secretariat for Economic Monitoring, part of the Ministry of Finance, reviewed a deal under the country’s competition law. It recorded that the two founders owned, in equal halves, a company called Construmega – Megacenter da Construção, formed in May 2000, which ran six building-materials stores in São Paulo state, in towns including Praia Grande, Santo André, Jundiaí and Sumaré. The same two partners also owned two companies trading as Telhanorte, each with two stores in São Paulo or Guarulhos.

The deal under review was the purchase of 60 per cent of Construmega by Lapeyre, a French building-materials retailer controlled through the holding Poliet by the Saint-Gobain group. The founders kept 20 per cent each through their own holding companies and stayed on to run the business, the opinion says. After the deal Construmega was to hold nine stores: its own six, plus the Telhanorte stores on the Marginal, at Fernão Dias and at Vila Galvão. The Secretariat recommended approval without restrictions.

Portuguese Wikipedia dates Saint-Gobain’s acquisition of Telhanorte to 2000, the year the deal was notified. From then on the name Telhanorte, rather than Construmega, became the banner of the French group’s building-materials retail business in Brazil, which Portuguese Wikipedia describes as Saint-Gobain Distribuição Brasil.

Big boxes, neighbourhood shops and a store that never closes.

By September 2016 Telhanorte had 40 stores, 32 of them in São Paulo state and the rest in Minas Gerais and Paraná, Brazil Journal reported.

In 2019 the company went through what Portuguese Wikipedia calls a transformation: a market repositioning, a new visual identity and a new store concept. One documented result is a small-format chain called Telhanorte Já!. Mercado&Consumo reported in December 2020 that the company had opened four more of these neighbourhood stores in São Paulo, in Lapa, Tatuapé, Vila Leopoldina and Mooca, bringing the format to eight units. The shops average about 200 square metres and give access to the more than 40,000 products of a full home centre through what the trade calls an “endless shelf” — the rest of the range is ordered digitally from the chain’s stock. The format was developed with the retail consultancy Gouvêa Consulting.

Services sit at the centre of that format. Mercado&Consumo described Projete-se, in which designers produce a free three-dimensional image of the room a customer wants to renovate; a van that visits homes to measure jobs, work out quantities and lend samples of floor and wall tiles to architects; same-day delivery within a short radius; and sales by WhatsApp with payment by link.

The company’s website describes other parts of the business in its own words. Pro Telhanorte is a store concept for building professionals, contractors, maintenance firms and hobbyists, with specialist service and its own product range. Its Telhanorte Marginal store in Água Branca, São Paulo, is open 24 hours, covers 13,000 square metres and includes a Projete-se space, the company says. The website lists more than 50,000 items across its range.

The chain has kept adding digital tools. In August 2026 Mercado&Consumo reported that Telhanorte was using an artificial-intelligence sales assistant, built with the software firm OminiChat, which answers questions, prepares quotes, sends payment links and completes orders through messaging when staff are not available.

Design and documentation.

Home-improvement and hardware chains speak to two audiences at once: households fixing, painting or refitting a room, and builders, trades and small contractors buying in bulk. Many chains answer that split with separate store formats under one name. In Chile, Sodimac runs a Homecenter format for home projects and decoration and a Constructor format for building professionals, and its first store in Mexico combined both under one roof in 2018, according to Gestión.

The store sign carries most of the identity. A chain’s name sits on a large warehouse façade, often beside a car park and a drive-in yard for heavy materials, and the same mark then reappears on aisle signs, trolleys, staff aprons and delivery trucks. Own-label ranges, trade-loyalty schemes and tool-hire counters are usually named as part of that same system, so the house style has to work from a billboard down to a shelf label.

Ownership shapes how these brands present themselves. Some began as co-operatives of builders or independent hardware dealers, and some still describe that member or dealer structure on their corporate pages; others belong to large retail groups that also run supermarkets, department stores and shopping centres, and that publish their store networks country by country. Sodimac belongs to Falabella and Easy to Cencosud, two Chilean retail groups whose home-improvement chains have competed in Chile since the 1990s, Peru Retail reported in November 2026.

Corporate history pages are where these companies tell their own story: the founding co-operative, the family or group that took control, the first store abroad. Read as a set, the chains in this series show how one category, from Latin America to North America, Asia, New Zealand and Europe, adapts a shared warehouse model to local ownership and local habits.

From Saint-Gobain’s Brazilian retail arm to a new owner.

Under Saint-Gobain the chain looked south. In September 2016 Brazil Journal reported that Telhanorte had agreed to buy Tumelero, a building-materials chain with 29 stores in Rio Grande do Sul, founded by Melson Tumelero in about 1967, subject to approval by Brazil’s competition authority, CADE. Portuguese Wikipedia dates the acquisition to 2017 and describes the two chains as forming Saint-Gobain Distribuição Brasil, which is why the businesses were often named together as Telhanorte Tumelero.

That pairing has since ended. Saint-Gobain sold Tumelero in December 2025, Mercado&Consumo reported.

As of May 2026, Telhanorte ran 27 stores and a logistics centre, with its presence concentrated in São Paulo state, and employed about 1,650 people, according to Mercado&Consumo. The company’s own website gives the same store count, all in São Paulo state, together with an online shop at telhanorte.com.br. The chain was still trading and launching new services in August 2026.

The store count tells its own story. From four Telhanorte stores in 2000, the chain grew to 40 by 2016 under Saint-Gobain, spreading into Minas Gerais and Paraná, before narrowing back to its home state by 2026.

For a design guide, Telhanorte shows how a building-materials retailer can carry the material in its name, a roof tile, through decades of owners and formats. Compare Sodimac, the Chilean home-improvement chain that also trades in Brazil, and Easy, another South American home-centre brand. For this guide we use roof-tile terracotta, mortar sand and a garden-wall green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Telhanorte’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.