Interior architecture walks the walk in Bergamo.
Archives for posts with tag: Italy
Love made visible in the Veneto countryside…
The stunning new ‘destination’ calendar by Milan photographer Gianni Pezzani rewrites the rules.
The new dual brand Moroso-Flos showroom looks so inviting you’d think you were sitting in a loft off Via Tortona rather than an ex-office building in London’s Clerkenwell. Which is, of course, the whole rather ambitious point, with the two Italian super brands setting up house together to sell not only furniture and lighting but the very culture of Made in Italy itself.
In a similar move, Moroso teamed up with Diesel and Foscarini in Milan for this years’s design week but I prefer the more grown up union with Flos. And so it seems might Patrizia Moroso, with plans afoot for more shared flagships (most likely starting with Beijing or Shanghai) in 2010.
via AT Casa
OK I admit it, I have a thing for older men lately, especially passionate, talented, distinguished ones like the Milanese Maesto Angelo Mangiarotti, still going strong at 88, and whose ethos includes “happiness comes from correctness”… The Mangiarotti anthology exhibition now showing in Mantova at the Casa del Mantegna until November 8 includes sculpture, architecture, design that looks like sculpture and the poignant, evocative free-hand drawings for which the architect is famous – and so well loved.
9ex AT Casa
I love this mirror. The way it floats is beautiful. But also the way it works: screening and revealing both at the same time.
This is Puglia on Italy’s southern coast where, a little ironically perhaps, big, honest, hard-working old farmhouses, masserie, are being converted into some of the most beautiful sanctuaries from the stress of modern living on the planet… Just don’t expect a holiday from design.
Open plan, high visibility kitchens have their place. (All over the place in fact.) But as readers of this blog may know, I am always on the look out for more sensitive (and sensible) ways to integrate the most important and clutter-prone zone in the house. Enter this rather lovely apartment conversion in Lucca where a folding glass screen instantly elevates the kitchen to the status of a ‘room of its own’ (with all the potential for privacy and sanctuary that brings), without compromising the all-important visual connection with the rest of the home. Beautiful - and very useful I’d imagine.
Ever since my first time at I Saloni one year ago, Milan has been at the centre of my design radar like never before. It’s hard to describe but, the travails and pleasures of the city in design week (seriously silly hotel bills, sardine style tube rides and a drenching last day of rain included) seem to have morphed into an unswerving loyalty to Italy’s second biggest metropolis. I feel like I’ve joined a very special club.
Milan design week 2009 starts today and I wish with all my heart I were there. To those of you who can be, enjoy, appreciate - and don’t forget to pack your umbrella.
In an effort to kickstart the building sector, the Italian government is relaxing planning laws and encouraging its mainly apartment-dwelling populus to add a new room or two. Not the worst idea in the world granted, but with Prime Minister Berlusconi content to trust matters of design and aesthetics to the ‘good taste of the Italian people’, it did not take long for Piano Casa to raise the ire of architects and planners all over, including that of the venerable Massimiliano Fuksas.
So with all this in mind, the roof top ‘residential containers’ concept by Czech architects HSH seems like it might be a step in the right direction. The outside of the containers is left in the original rough steel finish – a deliberate ploy designed to neutralise the contrast with the architecture of the host building below. Interiors of course need suffer no such identity crisis. And, best of all, windows are simply cut in as required to frame the view.
