The Past Is Present
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/the-past-is-present/?ref=t-magazine
You can’t be modern if you don’t know the past. Innovation
doesn’t happen in a vacuum; you need to know the history of what came before.
This is true in architecture, decorating and furniture design. And it’s evident
in the interiors of the Milan
town house designed by Studio Peregalli for Claudio Luti, the C.E.O. of the
Italian furniture company Kartell, and his wife, Maria. Kartell was founded in
1949 by Maria’s father, Giulio Castelli, a chemical engineer. Maria’s mother,
Anna Castelli Ferrieri, was an architect who designed numerous products for the
company, which was and still is a pioneer in sleek, contemporary plastic
furniture. But the Lutis don’t live in a modern structure; instead, their house
is a richly textured, densely layered composition of interpretations of
history, rather than direct references to it. “It’s a funny situation that
someone who makes that kind of furniture has a house like this,” Roberto
Peregalli remarked. But modern references abound, in the form of numerous
pieces from Kartell, ingeniously placed throughout the house, which demonstrate
that the present is just the latest point on a continuum.
The Lutis bought the Liberty-style house (the Italian
version of Art Nouveau) in the mid-1990s from Leonardo Mondadori, of the
Italian publishing family, who had hired Renzo Mongiardino, the legendary
20th-century Milanese architect and decorator, to design its rooms. So it was
fitting that the couple hired Studio Peregalli to renovate the house for them:
its partners, Laura Sartori Rimini and Roberto Peregalli, had both worked for
Mongiardino, and since founding their firm in Milan in 1993, their work has
reflected Mongiardino’s preference for — and adroitness at — blending new and
old, real and fake, in order to bring history to life. As Peregalli once said,
“We like the past as we imagine it today — a reverie, a dream about the past.”
Or, as he put it succinctly, “We don’t do period rooms.”
Which was just fine with the Lutis, who had lived in a
modern house before buying this one, but needed a change; especially Maria
Luti, a cardiologist, who had grown up with modern interiors. They wanted
something warmer, but what they didn’t want was to live in a museum. “I don’t
like a house that is all modern, or all old and important. I like to mix. The
house has to be made day by day, not perfect from the first day,” Claudio Luti
said.
From the start, Peregalli and Sartori Rimini knew that they
wanted to refer to the house’s architectural pedigree in its interiors. “We
wanted something connected to the facade and the moment the house was built,”
Peregalli said. In the entry, for example, after ripping out a staircase they
deemed depressing, the designers replaced it with spiral stairs that wind
around a new, cylindrical elevator, its cage covered with filigreed ironwork
that evokes the Art Nouveau era. These are framed by an oversize arch, and the
entry walls are adorned with faux marble panels and a painted leaf pattern that
is an homage to the British Arts and Crafts designer William Morris.
The entry opens onto the library and living room. The
latter, which Peregalli and Sartori Rimini filled with a mixture of antique
furniture and custom-designed upholstered pieces, is lined with fabric that is
hand-painted in a stylized botanical pattern; the designers copied it from a
set of 18th-century Córdoba leather panels. In the garden-level dining room,
they covered the walls with mirrored panels to bring light in; the panels,
which are “cloudy,” so that they look old, are painted with trompe l’oeil
friezes, wainscoting, urns and a partially-open door. Under a 19th-century
Russian chandelier, an antique table is surrounded by clear plastic Louis Ghost
chairs, a 2002 design for Kartell by Philippe Starck that famously bridges past
and present. “They work with all the reflections,” Peregalli said. “We like
their transparency.”
The dialogue between Studio Peregalli’s interiors and the
Kartell pieces continues throughout the house. Patricia Urquiola’s graphic
Comback chair, a Pop-tinged update of the Windsor chair, is a recent addition
that offers a counterpoint to the entry’s profusion of patterns. In a bedroom
upstairs, Ron Arad’s Bookworm shelf looks like a piece of sculpture against a
backdrop of striped wallpaper. These industrially produced designs look
perfectly at home among the rooms’ traditional furnishings and meticulous
details.
For Claudio Luti, who came to the furniture business from
the fashion world — he headed Gianni Versace’s company for 10 years before
moving to Kartell in 1988 and turning it into an international success — the
difference between working with Studio Peregalli and working with designers
like Starck and Urquiola is not so great. “I like to work with a designer
continuously,” he said, “not just when they have one idea. I don’t wait for the
sketch with the best idea. I like to see people often; it’s important to work a
lot together, and to take risks in design.” (Luti was recently named the
president of Cosmit, the Italian furniture manufacturers association that
organizes the annual Milan Furniture Fair.) Peregalli agrees. “You have to
understand what clients want,” he said. In this case, the Lutis, Peregalli and
Sartori Rimini all brought definite points of view to the conversation, and the
house resonates with them.