ENTRE VEIOS || Studio Marina Salles Celebrates Brazilian Woodworking Craftsmanship at CASACOR São Paulo
At CASACOR São Paulo 2026, inside a 31-square-meter room within the historic buildings of Parque da Água Branca, Studio Marina Salles asks what a tree remembers once it becomes furniture.
The home office, titled Entre Veios, marks the studio's debut at the 39th edition of CASACOR São Paulo, the design exhibition running from June 2 to August 9 across 70 environments in the city's most storied early 20th-century park.
Entre Veios translates to "between wood grains," and the name carries the project's argument. Architect Marina Salles built the space around CASACOR's 2026 theme, Mente e Coração, Mind and Heart, treating the grain as a kind of ledger, proof of a tree's growth recorded before any human hand touches it. The heart, she explains, lives in the gesture that turns timber into object; the mind lives in the precision of joinery that respects it. For Salles, handcrafting becomes the polishing of nature itself, a discipline rooted in patience as much as in technique.
The home office unfolds as a single continuous study, desk, shelving, and lounge dissolving into one material conversation.
That philosophy is most visible in the room's anchor: a modular wall built from 35 centimeter square panels alternating natural and charred pine, their knots and grain left exposed rather than sanded into uniformity. Every panel can be disassembled and reused once the exhibition closes, a sustainability decision built directly into the design language. A drywall portal frames the wall as the room's visual centerpiece, lowering the perceived ceiling height and giving the generous historic room an unexpected sense of intimacy.
Stacked shelves of native timber samples, books, and hand tools turn the wall into a working archive of Brazilian craft.
The furnishings read as a survey of Brazilian design history. In the reading lounge, the Ginza sofa by Isabelle de Mari exposes its solid sucupira wood frame like a skeleton on display, paired with the Vaivém armchair by Leon Ades, hand built in his São Paulo woodworking studio. The Benjamin armchair by Sergio Rodrigues, a touchstone of Brazilian furniture design, wears Marina Lafer's hand loomed fabric here, set beside the Macarrão side table from Oficina de Marcenaria.
Heloísa Crocco's reclaimed wood panel holds its own record of time, hung like a third, quieter wall to the room's argument.
At the room's working core sits the Demoiselle desk, designed by Lia Siqueira for Etel in solid wood, with the Gir chair by Juliana Llussá. The surrounding shelving doubles as a teaching tool, lined with native species samples including cumaru, catuaba, and roxinho alongside hand tools and a bibliography spanning Japanese wooden architecture to Brazilian masters like Sergio Rodrigues and Carlos Motta. The art curation extends the material study further: textural works by Heloísa Crocco, sculptures by Advânio Lessa drawn from the forest's own morphology, reclaimed urban wood pieces by Rodrigo Bueno, sandpaper collages by Vitor Mazon, and a watercolor created for the space by Salles herself.
The Ginza sofa and Vaivém armchair settle beneath Rodrigo Bueno's canvas, velvet and timber holding their own against the wooden screen's quiet reflection.
Overhead, a new ceiling combines cove lighting with wood veneers by Alpi, the lighting design by Estúdio Carlos Fortes warming the room through Interlight fixtures without competing with the textures below. The original peroba wood floor, restored rather than replaced, runs beneath all of it, and the historic windows facing the park complete the loop, tree to timber to room, and back out toward the trees again.
Entre Veios does not ask visitors to admire wood from a distance. It asks them to notice what survives the making, the knot, the grain, the small imperfection a factory would sand away, and to recognize that as the point.
PROJECT DETAILS
Project: Entre Veios Home Office
Location: CASACOR São Paulo 2026, Parque da Água Branca
Project Year: 2026
Interior Design: Studio Marina Salles Arquitetura e Interiores
Lighting Design: Estúdio Carlos Fortes, with fixtures by Interlight
Photography: Fran Parente
Featured Pieces: Ginza sofa by Isabelle de Mari; Vaivém armchair by Leon Ades; Benjamin armchair by Sergio Rodrigues, upholstered by Marina Lafer; Macarrão side table, Oficina de Marcenaria; Demoiselle desk by Lia Siqueira for Etel; Gir chair by Juliana Llussá
Art Curation: Heloísa Crocco, Advânio Lessa, Rodrigo Bueno, Vitor Mazon, and a watercolor by Marina Salles
