Nosso is filled with a bounty of bright, bold and brilliant design. Christi Nortier spoke to owner and curator Julia Franco about the ties that bind Brazil, South Africa and beyond.
Julia can’t go longer than six months without returning home to Brazil. Despite moving from Brazil to the US during high school, life keeps bringing her back there again and again. She studied marketing and communication in Ohio before moving back to Brazil to study and work in hotel management. Marketing called her to Milan, where she studied and worked for trend forecaster WGSN and luxury Italian design company Roberto Cavalli. After six years in Milan, she fell in love with a South African – and then his home country. They married and moved to Durban where she founded Shwe, an organisation that assists women in vulnerable circumstances to set up their own shweshwe handbag-making business and export their products. After a divorce, she married a Durbanite and now has a three-year-old son.
But Brazil kept knocking. After her frequent trips, South African friends and family would admire her purchases and soon started asking her to bring Brazilian decor back to SA for them. While working her way through the book The Artist’s Way, the penny dropped: she would open a store in Sea Point to tell the story of Brazilian artists and share their colourful, handmade pieces. And a year later, that’s exactly what she did.
What is it that makes Brazilian design so unique?
There’s a gigantic blend of cultures in Brazil – it has some of the biggest populations of Italians, Japanese, Lebanese and Koreans outside of their countries. There are many African descendants, since Salvador was the biggest port for enslaved people arriving in the Americas.
They have kept those cultures alive – for example, you will still find women making lace like the French nuns, even though you can’t find that technique in France anymore. This big mixture means we have influence from every- where. I also think that the Brazilian weather and climate makes everything quite bright. After the trend of having everything in grey, I think people are craving colour.
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How do you go about selecting items for the store?
There are a few criteria. It needs to be beautiful and well-made. The person has to be nice, which sounds funny but it’s because it comes through in their work and we’re making a community of like-minded people. For example, there’s an artist from an Amazonian tribe who paints on canvas whatever they paint on their bodies. So the money he raises goes towards the tribe. We look for people like that, who are actually making some difference and trying new techniques. We have an artist using crushed eggshells to make lamps and tables, one using paper and plastic to make sculptures, and another making 3D printed lamps from corn and sugarcane.
Human nature is to be joyful and playful, and that comes out in the love of crafting and using colour.
What is the atmosphere like in Brazil?
Although Brazilians come from everywhere, we all speak one language and that unites us. My favourite place is São Paulo, which is very metropolitan. It’s one of the world’s biggest cities, and it’s very vibrant and creative. It gets very hot so people stay out late into the night, sitting outside on pavements or verandas. I love that because it creates community. I find people are forced to talk to each other and forced to agree or disagree. This sense of community is Brazil’s strength.
As a person who curates, do you think there’s a difference between being artistic and creative?
I find that there’s a big difference. I am not artistic at all. I can’t draw or paint. But I feel that I’m very creative, just not with my hands! I can put something together, though. The artist is the main person making something, but you need someone to put it together and present it. We joke at the shop that we rearrange the shelves almost every day and at home I’m constantly repainting or moving things. It’s not a pursuit of perfection, but of joy. It’s fun!
Tell us about your favourite items, and the ones that are popular with your customers.
I only buy things for the shop that I really would put in my house, so I love everything really! But I love the handmade double-sided throws, the animal face vases and the beach chairs. And the vases made from 700 eggshells. There’s a lot to love! Some customer favourites are the throws, beach chairs and eggshell lamps. We’ve even had
Brazilians come in here to buy things to take home – they say they can’t find this stuff in Brazil. The store changes all the time, because we’re constantly getting new stock and rearranging things.
How do you find the artists?
It’s just a lot of research. My family is involved in design so I know some artists, and once you know one then they tell you about other people doing amazing things. You get into this network of people making art in different ways. There are 210 million Brazilians, and they are very creative.
What do you think are the links between South African and Brazilian design?
A lot of people ask me: ‘Why Brazil? Why not local South African decor?’ I do think we have such a big link. I named the store Nosso, which means ‘ours’. And I don’t mean ours, as in Brazil. I believe these pieces are ours – the people, the artists – and it’s a sample not just of what Brazilians can do, but what we can all do as people.
I find that Brazilians and South Africans use the same materials. We do have this deep suffering in our cultures and I think that links us a lot. When we write up the artists’ stories for the store, there’s always this deep longing for understanding and connection. Someone is trying to say something that they can’t say in words because it’s more like a feeling, and I feel like in South Africa there’s a lot of that, too. Both countries have this repressed way of communicating, which comes out in different ways. I think art is a beautiful way to express that. Human nature is to be joyful and playful, and that comes out in the love of crafting and using colour.
What are your hopes and dreams for the store?
I want to keep bringing things that bring joy. The store is one year old now, so we’re reassessing how we make our vision a reality and why. We’re talking about maybe working with different countries or even local South African artists, because our core is about bringing together joyful pieces and making people’s homes very bright and fun. That’s not tied to a specific country. In 2025, we want to bring more Brazilian artists to South Africa to do workshops to start a conversation between Brazil and South Africa. We also have the Nosso House, which is an Airbnb in the Bo-Kaap, where we are going to showcase the mix of Brazil and South Africa.
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By: Christi Nortier
Photographs: Supplied
