ONE COLD MORNING in April 2020, the furniture designer Etel Carmona woke up in the Serra da Mantiqueira mountains of southeastern Brazil, lost in fog. The ridges she had seen when she arrived the previous day — a familiar view from her childhood outside the nearby village of Sapucaí-Mirim — had disappeared entirely. Carmona, 78, had come to this plot on a forested hillside on the advice of her son, Nelo Augusto, 49, who had happened upon the plot while driving among olive groves and coffee plantations in the south of the Minas Gerais state. Carmona traveled from her home in São Paulo, 120 miles to the southwest, as soon as she could; thanks to Nelo Augusto’s negotiations with the owner, she stayed the night at a peculiar two-story house that was then the property’s only building. Waking the next morning in the clouds, “I decided I needed to have a home there,” she says. “Because I have a close relationship with this landscape.” More than a house, the project — a country refuge for herself, her three children and their families — would be a homecoming.
Decades had passed since Carmona had spent any real time near her birthplace. She had relocated to São Paulo in her teens to complete her studies and had remained in the city until the early 1980s, when, exhausted by the noise and traffic, she moved with her then husband and their young family to Louveira, a town about 45 miles to the northwest. Frustrated by her attempts to find furniture for the house, Carmona set up a woodworking atelier on the property in 1985 where she and local carpenters manufactured credenzas, bed frames and dining tables, all of which they made by adapting traditional joinery techniques into contemporary forms. In 1993, Carmona opened a design studio and gallery. Over the next decade, her now-52-year-old daughter, Lissa, who today runs the company, expanded it beyond designs by Carmona and her close contemporary Claudia Moreira Salles to include authorized re-editions of iconic midcentury furnishings by Brazilian masters like Lina Bo Bardi, Joaquim Tenreiro and Jorge Zalszupin.
T’s Design Issue
Inside six very different family residences.
- Carl and Karin Larsson’s exuberant, art-filled houses in Sweden.
- An art dealer’s strangely familiar Venetian apartment.
- A mountain compound in Brazil where a big family found a way to live together and apart.
- Is it architecture or is it art? A Parisian couple celebrate the in-between.
- A family’s reimagined beach house in the Philippines.
- Brandon Flynn and Jordan Tannahill’s cinematic East Village apartment.
Though Lissa would eventually guide the design process for the family’s mountain compound, it took her more than four months to visit the property. During that time, her mother and siblings had shared pictures and a few sketches for a sprawling seven-bedroom house. When Lissa finally saw the 10-acre lot in person, the concept seemed wrong to her: Why build something so big and disruptive in a place this tranquil and wild? Rather than a single, hulking volume, she proposed a cluster of dwellings, set into three clearings made by the previous owners in the native forest of araucaria, manacá and ipê trees, that would allow the family to build without further excavating the site.