May 24, 2026Five years ago, when Greg Santos was 26, he left a career in investment banking. “If I am going to do something creative and crazy, now is the time,” the Miami native recalls thinking.
Interior design was an obvious choice. His maternal grandmother, though not a designer, was an inspiration. “She has fiery red hair and drove a lavender Cadillac,” he says. “Her house had things like a peacock chair — it looked like a giant, rattan throne — and mirrored walls in rooms with colored lights. There was always this sense that a home could be expressive, a little theatrical and an escape from everyday reality. Growing up around that made me feel that, as a designer, I could bring people joy.”
So, Santos signed up for an interior design course. He soon dropped out because, he says, “I didn’t enjoy being taught a lot of rules.” Instead, he apprenticed himself to Luis Pons, a famously creative Miami-based product, furniture and interior designer.
While working with Pons, Santo had a casual Zoom meeting with his former investment-banking mentor in New York. “No agenda, just reconnecting,” he recalls. But when Santos mentioned that he was starting a career in interior design, the banker said he was preparing to build a multigenerational house — for himself, his mother, his sister and her children — outside São Paulo, Brazil.
“He asked me if I wanted to bid on the interiors,” Santos remembers. “I said, ‘Sure,’ as if I’d ever bid on anything like that before.” Pons helped him create a detailed proposal. A month later, he learned he had the job. Says Santos, “It was very emotional for me, having left finance, to find that the person I trusted most and learned the most from was open to reconnecting with me in my chosen field.”
The house’s architect, Reinach Mendonça, had, Santos observed, done a wonderful job of orienting it to maximize the amount of sunlight reaching each room. With walls of matte white plaster, the house provided a clean backdrop for the client’s existing collection of BRAZILIAN PAINTINGS.
Those walls, and floors of off-white travertine, also provided consistency: Since the rooms are arranged around a central courtyard, every part of the house is visible from every other part. That complicated Santos’s job. As he furnished the house, he says, “I had to tie it all together.”
Right inside the front door, he placed a bench designed by Pedro Ávila, who cofounded São Paulo’s Estúdio Orth and was building his own body of work. Its shape is based on the arches of Oscar Niemeyer’s Itamaraty Palace, in Brasilia.
Just off the foyer is the starkest exception to the white-walls rule: a powder room paneled in imbuia wood with an open-pore stain. “It has a natural aroma to it, almost like nutmeg and cinnamon,” says Santos. He purchased a 3-D-printed porcelain sink by Daniel Arsham, one of 99 the artist created for Kohler. Supported by a hand-cast patinated-brass boulder, it sits on a countertop of Brazilian Verde Fusion granite. “We chose a slab that felt slightly psychedelic,” the designer says.
Above the sink is a Gio Ponti–designed mirror, newly issued by Gubi. On either side of this are sconces from New York’s RBW, made of polyurethane fabric stretched over wire frames.
As for the living room, Santos says, “We wanted it to be a showcase of nineteen-fifties Brazilian design.” It includes a pair of Brasiliana sofas and an Ouro Preto Sling chair, both by Jorge Zalszupin, and a Bowl chair by Lina Bo Bardi. “The client was excited about living with these greatest hits,” says the designer, noting that a few of the pieces in the space are vintage, but most are new.
The steel fireplace “sharpens the room,” adding contrast in a house that is largely “warm and soft. The steel adds contrast,” says Santos. To round out the furnishings, he selected a console table that looks like a cross between a wild animal and a Roman aqueduct, with a light-blue acid finish that he describes as “almost like a jolt of energy. It keeps the room from feeling too resolved.”
The dining room’s six mid-century Sergio Rodrigues chairs — made in Italy by ISA Bergamo and covered in gray chenille — can be seen through the custom glass top of the big Paracarro table, notable for its bullet-shaped concrete bases, by Giovanni Offredi for Saporiti.
The space also contains a tall angular chair Santos designed, modeling it on a Belgian modern clergy chair he encountered on a trip to Europe. Overhead is an Artichoke pendant by Poul Henningsen for Louis Poulsen. The connections between Brazilian designers and Europe — many were from there, some moved or returned there after Brazil’s 1964 military coup — make the presence of Continental pieces in the house historically resonant.
In the client’s home office is a credenza clad in Brazilian wood veneers, part of Pons’s Tangara system crafted by the furniture maker Vermeil, which happens to be based in São Paulo. “That’s a very happy coincidence,” says Santos. “It made it easy for us to modify pieces from Luis’s collection and also allowed us to collaborate with them on additional pieces, like the dining room bar, a living room side table and the client’s desk.”
That desk stands in the office in front of a travertine wall fitted with custom steel shelving. The room also includes Swedish Monk Chairs and a screen designed by Pons and made from two Brazilian woods that resemble teak and mahogany.
All of the public rooms open onto the courtyard through glass sliders that disappear into the walls. “It’s really indoor-outdoor living,” Santos says. One upshot: The outdoor furniture had to be as carefully selected as the indoor. Juliana Lima Vasconcellos’s famous Giraffe chairs, upholstered in an outdoor fabric, crowd around a sinuous contemporary dining table. Also in the courtyard is a circa 1900 mosaic-topped Brazilian table, which Santos bought on 1stDibs.
Each of the family bedrooms tells a different story. Santos’s client is intrigued by the influence Japanese culture has had on Brazilian aesthetics. Across from his bed, the designer hung a group of late-19th-century Japanese wood panels, purchased on 1stDibs and illuminated by Japanese paper lanterns.
In the sister’s room, furnishings include Vasconcellos’s playful Confetti chair and a Brenne desk by Christiane Lemieux. On the wall is a custom arrangement of free-form mirrors by California artist Alexey Krupinin that Santos commissioned through 1stDibs.
For Santos, the project required almost as much logistical as design talent. He had pieces from around the world delivered to his house in Miami, where he could inspect them, then moved them to a warehouse he had rented for the project. When it was time, he shipped two full containers from Miami to São Paulo.
Back then, he worked at home. Now, Studio Santos has an office in the Little River neighborhood of Miami. The studio has completed 11 projects, with five more in the works. They include a house in Boston, a condo in Utah’s Park City, the New York offices of the media company VaynerX, a vintage Miami mansion and a penthouse apartment in Costa Rica encompassing a triple-height botanical garden. “It’s less about decorating and more about building an ecosystem that people live within,” Santos says.
Among all these commissions, the São Paulo project remains Santos’s sentimental favorite, not only because it was his first but also because it connected him to an earlier chapter of his life. And it gave him the confidence to take on bigger and more complicated jobs. When a new project comes along, he says, “I’m comfortable telling the client, ‘I’m going to get it done,’ even if I haven’t yet figured out how.”
