ETEL: two Brazilian designers beside Lake Como

Wood gave ETEL’s Lake Como presentation a common language without making its designers interchangeable. The work of Claudia Moreira Salles and Etel Carmona shared a material while retaining different ways of shaping it.

WAYFARER’s September 2025 account described the display at Villa del Grumello during the seventh Lake Como Design Festival. The festival’s theme, Fragments, connected contemporary work with historic buildings around Como.

The fragment as a starting point

Inside the restored sixteenth-century villa, the Brazilian company’s selection treated timber as something carrying its own history. Grain, age and earlier use could influence the object rather than disappear beneath a uniform finish.

The archive described ETEL’s recovery of older wood and its interest in finding uses for offcuts. These were statements about the company’s approach, not an independent audit establishing that every residue was reused.

The presentation also revisited elements of A Tribute to Craftsmanship, shown at Milan Design Week earlier in 2025. Bringing Moreira Salles and Carmona together made the relationship between generations visible through pieces rather than a purely biographical narrative.

The exhibition has its own historical date. Its wider subject remains useful: continuity in design is not the repetition of one shape. It can be the survival of an approach to a material, carried into new objects by different hands.

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Adapted from the WAYFARER Brazil archive, first published 2025-09-22. English adaptation: 6 October 2026. This is an archival account, not a report of a new visit. Exhibitions, collections and menu details are described in their original context, not as current availability.