By Design: Ulysses de Santi

Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s campaign for Tiffany & Co – filmed in the extravagant Orum House in LA in 2021 – offers a feast of art and design. The house itself, a three-storey, fully glazed affair, was designed by Zoltan Pali in the 2010s, and was recently on the market for $56m. A multimillion-pound Basquiat hangs on the wall. But aficionados of Brazilian furniture will surely have been most thrilled by the Cubo chair, a piece of late Modern perfection by Jorge Zalszupin from the early 1970s, on which Jay-Z sprawls in a sharp black suit. “That’s my chair!” says Ulysses de Santi. “Jeanne Greenberg had called my partner about finding a house in LA for the shoot, and we lent some furniture.”

De Santi’s husband is the art dealer Graham Steele, while de Santi himself is one of the few people to focus exclusively on sourcing and selling 20th-century Brazilian Modernist design. “Growing up in Brazil when I did, you were surrounded by Modernism, especially Niemeyer’s architecture, and it gets under your skin,” says 41-year-old de Santi. “I found myself wanting to know more, then I discovered all the incredible furniture designers – Jose Zanine Caldas, Sergio Rodrigues. Some, like Joaquim Tenreiro and Zalszupin were immigrants, from Portugal and Poland respectively, and fell in love with the natural resources that Brazil offered. Their love of its superb varieties of vibrantly coloured wood – such as jacaranda and peroba – resonates through their work.”

“Brazilian modern is about people marking out a new lifestyle,” says de Santi. “As a former Portuguese colony, Brazil’s style favored thick velvet curtains in Baroque palaces. It didn’t make any sense.” The Modernists reflected instead the inherent ease and joy in Brazilian culture, bringing a decidedly sensuous twist to the established European blueprint.

De Santi, who worked in TV and as an actor in Brazil, took a career turn when he moved to LA to be with Steele. (The pair met in São Paulo in 2014 at a White Cube opening for the artist Larry Bell. Bell was best man at their wedding.) “I brought all my furniture with me,” says de Santi. “And friends and Graham’s clients would come to the house and just want to talk about it. Or buy it!” The business he then set up with art dealer Cecilia Tanure has become a huge success. “We don’t have a gallery,” de Santi explains. “But we try to put on four presentations a year in different cities – there’s one in London this fall. And with Cecilia and myself both being Brazilians, we like to put on a bit of a party, too.”