CASA SIMONETTO HONORS JANETE COSTA AT CASACOR 2026

Walk into the show house at Parque da Agua Branca and the first thing that registers is not a color or a chair. It is a fireplace, planted dead center in a room built for symmetry, a gesture that only makes sense once you know whose memory it argues with. Casa Simonetto, Tribute to Janete Costa, is the newest entry in CASACOR Sao Paulo 2026, a 160 square meter house by Gabriel Fernandes of GF Estudio 55 that treats a woman gone eighteen years as a working collaborator.

A Fireplace Sits Dead Center In The Room

Symmetry organizes Casa Simonetto around a single axis, and the fireplace sits on it like a hinge. Gabriel Fernandes built the space for Simonetto, the furniture brand he has now worked with four times at CASACOR, and gave the kitchen's joinery the job of arranging every function around the dining table, not the stove.

The cabinetry wears a new veneer of pau ferro wood, edges softened with delicate bevels, finished caramel toned so the grain reads as timber, not factory sheet. Monumentality here is not square footage. It is one long run of joinery doing the work three or four scattered pieces of furniture usually do, closer to how Type7's Mapleton House treats zinc and silver ash as argument, not finish, than to a typical trade show vignette.

Janete Costa Trained In Rio, Then Went Home

Janete Costa was born in Garanhuns, Pernambuco, in 1932 and earned her architecture degree from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1961. She spent four decades practicing what critics now call brasilidade: putting Northeastern basketry, ceramics and rough carpentry inside rooms built for imported furniture and fine art, treating the craft as equal partner, not garnish.

She built her name largely through hotel interiors across Brazil, where earthy palettes and natural wood, fiber and clay stood in for the marble and chrome the industry expected. The Institute of Architects of Brazil named her top architect three years running, and Rio's Museum of Modern Art gave her an award of its own. She married modernist architect Acacio Gil Borsoi, and together they carried one argument, that a Brazilian house should look like Brazil, into offices in Recife, Rio and Sao Paulo. She died in Pernambuco in 2008; Recife opened a gallery in her name in 2011, Niteroi a folk art museum in 2012.

1987 Is When CASACOR Started Doing This

CASACOR launched in Sao Paulo in 1987 and has grown into the largest architecture, interior design and landscaping exhibition in Latin America. The format has barely changed: take a real, often underused site, hand its rooms to dozens of architects and designers, and let each build a complete, temporary environment under one shared yearly theme.

The 2026 Sao Paulo edition runs June 2 through August 9 at Parque da Agua Branca under the theme Mind and Heart, asking every participant to treat the home as a place for reconnecting with yourself rather than as a showroom of finishes. Casa Simonetto answers that brief literally, using one architect's memory as the organizing material, not a mood board pulled from this season's catalog.

Clay And Rough Plaster Come Before Concept Here

Gabriel Fernandes runs GF Estudio 55 in Sao Paulo and has built four environments with Simonetto at CASACOR, including a 2024 room built around pau a pique construction and a 2025 house drawn from telenovela set design. His approach starts from ordinary materiality, clay, rough plaster, humble wood, rather than an aspirational finish, then argues vernacular Brazilian building already solved problems design keeps rediscovering.

That is why Janete Costa is the reference point here, not a more decorated modernist. She spent her career insisting Northeastern craft belonged beside fine art, not underneath it. Fernandes's caramel toned pau ferro cabinetry makes the same case with one material instead of a manifesto, the kind of bespoke joinery that only earns its cost if the wood argues for itself, the way the engineering inside Herman Miller's Aeron justified a chair's price before its silhouette did.

A Mole Chair And A Show House Cabinet Make The Same Case

Sergio Rodrigues designed the Mole armchair in 1957 on the instinct Janete Costa applied to interiors: take Brazilian material and craft seriously enough to put it in rooms built for imported taste. The Mole now sits in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, and pieces by Rodrigues and his contemporaries regularly clear six figures at international design auctions.

That market did not exist when Costa was building hotel lobbies out of Northeastern basketry. It exists now because collectors, and increasingly fashion and art buyers furnishing sets and editorials, decided Brazilian craft was a material argument, not regional charm. Casa Simonetto is built on the same bet, one park pavilion at a time.

Casa Simonetto earns its tribute on two counts: a fireplace built as the room's symmetrical anchor, not a decorative afterthought, and a run of pau ferro cabinetry organizing the kitchen around a dining table instead of behind cabinet doors. Janete Costa spent forty years arguing Northeastern craft deserved the same room as imported furniture and fine art; Fernandes spent one CASACOR cycle proving the argument still holds inside a public park pavilion. Neither choice needed her name to justify it. That it carries her name anyway is the actual tribute.