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.
Lissa also wanted to collaborate exclusively with artisans and builders who knew the region’s climate, terrain, materials and traditions intimately. She had come across an unbuilt proposal for a prefabricated cabin designed for a luxury hotel in these mountains by the São Paulo-based firm AR Arquitetos, founded in 2008 by Marina Acayaba, 44, and her husband, Juan Pablo Rosenberg, 49. Best known for minimalist city houses inspired by the likes of the Portuguese architect Manuel Aires Mateus and the Japanese builder Tadao Ando, they had recently completed their own weekend place in a remote valley an hour’s drive south of the Carmona property. There the couple and several craftspeople had meticulously restored a 19th-century farmhouse with a brick terrace that linked the project to its natural surroundings, just as Lissa and her mother wanted. “In rural places,” Acayaba says, “there’s a different way of connecting.”
THE ARCHITECTS CAME up with a site plan almost immediately after visiting the property in 2021 — and it barely changed over two years of design and construction. The 1,400-square-foot, three-bedroom house that Carmona shares with her 49-year-old daughter, Camilla, the gallery’s commercial director, occupies the highest of the three clearings. That building’s peaked terra-cotta-tiled roof and stone foundations allude to the Portuguese-style farmhouses in the adjacent countryside, while a window that bends around one corner of the cozy wood-paneled living room represents, as Acayaba sees it, “a transgression of the traditional house.”
From there, a stone stairway leads down to a 3,983-square-foot shared pavilion, which projects out from the mountainside. Locally milled rose-toned cedar lines the structure’s interior walls, mimicking the blush-colored bricks that pave the floors and form a sculptural 18-foot-long island in the communal family kitchen. Pink dust kicked up from the floors will eventually stain the off-white upholstery on a Brasiliana sofa designed in the 1960s by Zalszupin and still produced by the gallery. Eventually, Lissa says, “everything will become the color of the earth.”
While Carmona’s house and the shared building cling to the mountain, the four-bedroom, 2,906-square-foot house for Lissa’s and Nelo Augusto’s families, facing the main pavilion across a scrubby hollow, hovers above shrubs cultivated by the landscape architect André Paoliello. Its flat concrete roof seems to sit on vertical slats of local muiracatiara wood and banks of windows that, in a pair of bathrooms at the back of the house, pivot open to draw in the scent of a soaring eucalyptus tree. Seen from this house, the central pavilion’s sharp edges dissolve into a flat white plane that on foggy mornings “becomes part of the brume, something indefinite,” Lissa says. “Not above the clouds, in the clouds.” On those days, the only thing you can see is the matriarch’s gabled farmhouse rising from the mist — exactly as she’d imagined.
