Salon Art + Design 2026: A Casa Paulista: Pioneers of São Paulo Modern Interiors

This is not a display of furniture. It is a living room — because that is how modern São Paulo learned to live. The interiors of the 1950s were not encountered one chair at a time; they were sold, photographed and imagined as whole rooms. Bossa brings one of those rooms to New York.

Between 1952 and 1956, three addresses in downtown São Paulo redefined what a Brazilian home could look like. Estúdio Branco & Preto opened in late 1952, run by six young architects who could not find furniture worthy of the houses they were designing. Forma took shape the following year, as Martin Eisler joined Carlo Hauner's Móveis Artesanal. In 1953, Joaquim Tenreiro — already the master of the Rio scene — opened his São Paulo showroom on Rua Marquês de Itu, moving in 1956 to the newly inaugurated Conjunto Nacional. Three stores within a few blocks of one another, installed on the ground floors of the city's modern buildings, teaching São Paulo how to inhabit them.

What these stores sold was never a single object. At Galeria Artesanal, Georgia Hauner conceived complete environments in which furniture, art, textiles and light were composed as one image — a form of display that transformed how modern design was understood and desired. This selection takes her approach as its method. The booth is conceived as one room, to be entered, sat in and used, rather than surveyed from a distance.

Yet something is missing from every one of those rooms as history has preserved them. Forma's own catalogue lists tecidos and cortinas — fabrics and curtains — as core lines of business, alongside furniture and lighting. Branco & Preto operated the same way. The textile was not an accessory to the modern interior; it was half of it. But fabric wears out, and fabric was rarely credited. What survived were the structures — wood, iron, brass — and the history of Brazilian modernism came to be written from what endured rather than from what the rooms actually were.

The authors of that vanished layer were, disproportionately, women. Fayga Ostrower printed the fabric of Tenreiro's first modern armchair. Susi Aczel co-designed for Forma; her round table of 1953 is in this room. At Branco & Preto, Irene Ruchti designed the textiles that upholstered the studio's furniture — work that left almost no trace in the archive. 

This is why Bossa weaves. The handwoven fabrics on these pieces were developed from historical research into the textiles these stores produced and sold. They are not a restoration choice. They are the restitution of a layer the archive lost — remade with the authorship it was denied the first time.

Who, then, counts as a pioneer? Not only those who signed the wood and the iron, but those who composed the room. This selection asks the question by building the room again. Sit down.

Soon – November, 05 to 08

Park Avenue Armory, Upper East Side, Manhattan 

Booth D7