Luca Guadagnino is known for creating sumptuously layered environments that tell stories themselves.
Now he’s applied that same eye to his first interior design commission at La Filanda,
Federico Marchetti and Kerry Olsen’s weekend retreat.
A view of Lake Como from the house. Photo by Henry Bourne.
A spiral staircase designed by Luca Guadagnino covered in an ombré carpet by La Manufacture Cogolin. Photo by Henry Bourne.In the entry of the house, a pair of Adnet floor lamps, pendants by Michael Anastassiades, a rug by Cogolin and walls covered in
brass-detailed oak paneling designed by Guadagnino. Photo by Henry Bourne.
Another view of the entry. At right, a Lalanne console and mirror. Photo by Henry Bourne.
In the living room, Guadagnino designed the molding detail and bold yellow wall panels covered in Kvadrat fabric.
A Candida Höfer photograph hangs over an Italian rosewood sideboard. The 1930s caned mahogany chairs are by Kaare Klint,
the sofa is by Frits Henningsen, the side tables are by Hermès and the low table is by George Nakashima. Photo by Henry Bourne.
The yellow palette continues into the kitchen. Photo by Henry Bourne. 
Matte lacquered cabinets in shades of green in the laundry room. Photo by Henry Bourne.In a nautical-inspired powder room leading to the indoor pool, the emerald stone and brass hardware are by Studio Luca Guadagnino.
Photo by Henry Bourne.
A corridor on the second floor runs the length of the former factory. Photo by Henry Bourne.
In the master bedroom, the custom fireplace of emperador marble was inspired by a radiator cover in a Milanese palazzo,
the chairs were designed by Pierre Jeanneret for Knoll in 1952, the fabrics are by Kvadrat, the rug is by Cogolin
and the lamps are from the Netherlands’ Morentz gallery. Photo by Henry Bourne.
On the Cover: La Filanda, designed by Luca Guadagnino, is featured in T’s Sept. 23 Design & Luxury issue.
Here, a guest bedroom. Photo by Henry Bourne.
From the Director of
Call Me by Your Name,
a New Project: A HouseLuca Guadagnino has long dreamed of being an interior designer.
Inside a former silk mill on Lake Como, he got his shot.By Guy Trebay
Sept. 19, 2018FIRST, CUT SHARPLY off a two-lane road leading around Italy’s Lake Como and dodge the local stray cats until you hit a cobbled lane lined with scruffy mulberry trees. Follow this to its end. Then, on your left, you’ll see the stucco facade of an apparently anonymous edifice — an ocher two-story rectangle overlooking a simple walled garden and lawn, the lake just beyond them. This is La Filanda (the Mill), the name a nod to the 9,600-square-foot building’s original 19th-century function as a silk-weaving factory. Only a small nameplate — that says simply “housekeeper”— hints at the place’s current residential use. “We felt it was more interesting having something beautiful inside that nobody knows,” says Federico Marchetti, 49, the Milan-based entrepreneur behind the Yoox Net-a-Porter online retail empire. For the past four years, he and his partner, the British journalist Kerry Olsen, 41, have devoted themselves to constructing this privately opulent weekend refuge on a stretch of lakeshore best known for the palaces of American movie stars and Russian oligarchs.
In this they had an unusual collaborator: Luca Guadagnino, the Italian filmmaker, who had always wanted to be an interior designer. Marchetti knew of that dream from an interview that Guadagnino, 47, once gave; while Marchetti was visiting him on the set of Call Me by Your Name in 2016, he proposed that they collaborate on the house with the architect Giulio Ghirardi. Despite being in preproduction for his next project — a reimagining of the director Dario Argento’s 1970s Italian cult horror classic Suspiria, to be released in November — Guadagnino immediately agreed. “I’m a little bit irrational,” he admits.
Marchetti and Olsen had long been friends with the director, whose densely atmospheric film sets are memorable for their layered, subtle details: a barely seen armoire full of linen in 2009’s “I Am Love;” an actual notarized land deed used instead of a facsimile for 2017’s Call Me by Your Name. Guadagnino often films his movies in aristocratic villas or Art Deco-era wonders little known outside of Italy — environments are as critical to his vision as actors or scripts. “Space is the most important thing that comes to my mind when I analyze things,” Guadagnino says. “In cinema, you are an impostor, in a way, because you can always edit afterward and change the story. You cannot do that with a house.”
A house, after all, is not a fiction. And far from being theatrical types, Marchetti and Olsen envisioned their life at La Filanda as one oriented toward family and domestic pleasures. Marchetti, who was born and raised on the Adriatic coast, in Ravenna, is attracted to water and loves to swim. Olsen, from the north of England, enjoys gardening: Guided by Guadagnino’s colleague, Gaia Chaillet Giusti, she planted modest parterres in a chevron pattern, had two mature palms helicoptered onto the property from nearby Tremezzina and installed a dollhouse-like structure for the family’s pet tortoise, Frittata.
Inside, the couple sought a harmonious retreat. Guadagnino started with a psychologically detailed questionnaire: What colors do they like? What time of the day do they prefer? How do they see themselves in a room? Answers in hand — bright jewel tones, mornings, playing board games with their 7-year-old daughter, Margherita — the director began composing a storyboard in the form of a workbook, a thick volume that encompassed a minutely detailed inventory of the exemplary collection of 20th-century furniture that Marchetti had been amassing for years. “I’m a storyteller,” Guadagnino says. “That’s my first job.”
THOUGH SKILLED AT creating sumptuous movie sets, the director is neither a trained architect nor an interior designer. Along with a general contractor, the 150 Italian craftspeople Guadagnino assembled like a crew executed his design for the brass-trimmed, ribbed oak paneling used on the lower part of some walls (inspired by, Guadagnino says, “a very precious wood box, the kind you can find in Japan”); upholstered those same walls above the dado with Kvadrat wool fabrics in geometric panels in reference to both the structure’s origins as a textile factory and its mid-20th century Modernist design; and applied in stucco at the cornices a motif of double-ended ogives, a vaguely maritime style that alludes to the lake visible beyond the brass window frames. Still, La Filanda isn’t baldly literal in its references. While it is tempting to think of the place as engineered with the taut economy of a yacht interior, the house more accurately evokes a puzzle, one whose interlocking pieces seamlessly, and seemingly inevitably, fit together.
Before Guadagnino began, the couple had already gutted the building, which was constructed more than a century ago during a boom in an industry first begun at Como in the 1400s, when Ludovico Sforza (then the Duke of Milan) commanded that the lakeside be planted with mulberry trees for the delectation of silkworms. (Until as recently as the 1970s — when the industry migrated to China — silk remained the area’s most important commercial export.) In the decades after the shuttlecocks stopped clacking through looms at La Filanda, the mill was used as a tennis racket factory, then as an auto repair shop and, finally, as a depot for boat motors before sinking at last into pigeon-haunted desuetude. It was the building’s shoe-box shape that inspired Marchetti and Olsen to acquire it five years ago, after having spotted it on strolls from their nearby rental.
If executing their vision would prove complex, the impetus for the home’s purchase was simple: “My dream was always to have a pool,” Marchetti says. Originally intended for the ground floor, it was relocated to the basement after workers discovered that the soil beneath the building was contaminated with lead and would need to be removed. After the subterranean bathing pavilion was completed, the house’s transformation picked up pace, Guadagnino filling the home with treasures accumulated by the couple as well as pieces he found for them.
Guests enter La Filanda at the structure’s midpoint, a sunlit foyer dominated by an immense Claude Lalanne Bagatelle mirror framed in looping bronze tendrils and hung above a matching Lalanne console. For Marchetti, the pair of bronze mice he specified to scurry up the table’s struts are as much a source of pleasure as the Giorgio Morandi still life from the 1950s that he impulsively purchased from an online auction and that now hangs in the ground-floor powder room.
To the left of the entry, there’s a pantry whose lacquered pistachio cabinetry is branded Studio Luca Guadagnino, the filmmaker’s new design firm, and is rendered, like so much else in the house, in the confectionary hues of Jordan almonds. ( https://www.candywarehouse.com/resources/the-wedding-story-of-jordan-almonds/ ) Beyond this is a kitchen with custom-paneled shelves in varying tones of yellow (also created by Guadagnino’s firm) alongside an enormous suspended lighting fixture created in 1933 by Gio Ponti — merely one example of Marchetti’s irresistible attraction to every imaginable form of artificial illumination.
Extending toward the lake, the main 62-by-20-foot living area, which spans nearly half the length of the structure, is divided into three discrete zones of seating. What is most notable in each is how Guadagnino has arranged — as though a group of actors were conversing in a scene — decorative elements as disparate as a rugged 1960s George Nakashima slab table, a 1950s sycamore and rosewood Italian bar cabinet, caned chairs copied in Mumbai from early 20th-century designs by the French architect Maxime Old and a colossal 2009 photograph by the German artist Candida Höfer of the national library in Naples. A helipad-size marble table, custom built by Hermès, anchors the room. (With bespoke waxed-leather legs, it’s a marriage of Guadagnino’s passion for the handmade and the retailing mogul’s acquisitive appetites.)
Together, the designer and homeowners also plundered the archives of venerable European manufacturers. At the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory in Munich, Guadagnino and Olsen unearthed a disused French rose glaze to color a portion of their 303 pieces of china, some of which feature a pattern designed two centuries ago. At Manescalchi, a linen purveyor favored by the Milanese haute bourgeoisie, Guadagnino found from dead stock a collection of pristine place mats and napkins with elaborately handworked fagoting details. At J. & L. Lobmeyr glassworks in Vienna, he commissioned gossamer glassware etched with outlines of Lake Como.
AS WITH HIS FILMS, a second take was sometimes required. At the core of the house is an oak stairway resembling the interior of a chambered nautilus that links all three floors. Built once in its entirety, it was torn out and recreated after the original curve was judged to be clumsy. In keeping with the house’s palette, the treads are covered in a bespoke rainbow ombré carpet from France’s Gobelins Manufactory, the colors of which increase or diminish in intensity — yellow to orange to red to blue to green — as you ascend to the bedroom floor or descend to the screening and changing rooms at the pool level. “Even though the house is contemporary, it’s also meant to be a sensual place,” Guadagnino says.
This is most evident on the private upper level, where he designed cocooning spaces for each occupant, appointing the master suite with furnishings either quirky (reproductions of a pair of wavy 1940s Paolo Buffa night stands), austere (an Hermès re-edition of a 1924 Jean-Michel Frank parchment dressing table) or, as with the textured Cogolin rug, seductively tactile. Connected by a hallway that runs the length of the house, there are three bedrooms — one each for parents, daughter and guests — along with a study, a library and Olsen’s boudoir. (“Finally,” she says, “I have more closet space than Federico.”) It is in these rooms that Guadagnino seems to pay frank homage to one of his greatest influences: Villa Necchi Campiglio, the magnificent Milanese manor designed in the 1930s by Piero Portaluppi for two heirs to a sewing machine fortune, in which I Am Love was filmed. As with that house, the hand of a decorative mastermind appears in every detail at La Filanda. Throughout, cultivated restraint takes the place of ostentation. “Of all the great houses you could find on the lake, Federico and Kerry decided to go for this old factory,” Guadagnino says. “Here, everything important is inside.”And, of course, just two years ago:
The director Luca Guadagnino’s exquisitely art-directed movies have become something of an obsession among interior designers.
But his ultimate set is his own apartment in a 17th-century palazzo outside of Milan. The property had been empty for 40 years before
Guadagnino spent six months renovating it. With the help of painters, he created custom paint colors for each room.
Light floods the loggia, on the second floor of the palazzo. Gio Ponti Superleggera chairs by Cassina flank the dining table,
with vintage Danish chairs in the foreground. The ornately painted door is original to the building. Credit Mikael Olsson
A Tibetan tapestry hangs over a Hästens bed in the master bedroom, with Castellini chairs covered in Dedar fabric and
curtains of Hermès fabric. Photo: Mikael Olsson
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/t-magazine/luca-guadagnino-home-italy-interior-design.html
One Italian Filmmaker’s
Ultimate Set — His Own Home
Luca Guadagnino conjures a world of dark beauty in his films,
and in his apartment in a 17th-century palazzo outside of Milan.
By DANA THOMAS
AUG. 1, 2016
“I hate the concept of beauty for the sake of it. It is overrated,” says the Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino. This might sound odd coming from the creator of such movies as 2009’s I Am Love and this year’s A Bigger Splash, each filled with ravishing, fashionable people moving through exquisitely appointed, haute bourgeois settings — a style that could be described as high aesthete with latent passions lurking beneath. “Environment is essential. I like anything that has to do with form and space,” says Guadagnino. “But I am also a humanist [with] a very strong love and attraction for character. That’s the mixture.”
What he strives for, says his friend and frequent collaborator, the actress Tilda Swinton, is something “vital, passionate and uncontrollable.” These aspirations play out in his home as well, with each atmospheric room telling a story, much as his sets amplify his characters. Grand and simple, perfect and imperfect, harmony emerges from contrast and unlikely pairings, like modern Danish chairs in a room with doors lavishly embellished in the Lombardian Baroque style. “Spare functional furniture, in my opinion, is the genius of 20th-century design,” Guadagnino says. He adds, only half joking: “My secret desire is to be an interior designer. I’d love to make houses for rich clients who can afford to do things right.”
His calling card could be his 3,200-square-foot apartment, on the second floor of a 17th-century palazzo that sits in the heart of Crema, a city 40 minutes from Milan. When Guadagnino bought the place a few years ago, it had been empty for 40 years — since the countess who lived there died. It had “broken windows, a lot of dead pigeons and rotten wallpaper,” he says.
The renovation took six months, and Guadagnino was onsite “every day, directing the workers,” he says. After all, “I am a director.” What he discovered beneath layers of decaying wallpaper and bright midcentury paint was every palazzo owner’s dream: authentic frescoes. Ripping up the 1950s cement tiles revealed the original terracotta bricks, now cleaned and buffed. When a false ceiling was torn out in the kitchen, a 17th-century painted wood bench, now in Guadagnino’s bedroom, was found in a crawl space. He worked with the painters to mix pigment for the precise hues in each room; it took four tries to get the dining room right, from kelly green to the final slate gray. For the living room’s boiserie, he chose a navy that, depending on the hour of the day, can seem black. “The bedroom was easy,” he says. “I was eating a date, a beautiful brown, and I said to the painter, Do this color. It’s like being in the center of a huge date.”
In an office that doubles as a guest bedroom, he writes his scripts at one of two side-by-side leather desks. (His partner of seven years, also an Italian filmmaker, sits at the other.) Guadagnino, who has acquired other apartments in the building, has effectively turned much of it into his moviemaking compound. His production team works in a ground-floor suite that opens onto the cobblestone courtyard-cum-parking lot; he edits his films in a studio just above them. The actors in his films, lodged in nearby B&Bs, zoom over on bicycles and watch movies on a screen mounted to a wall in the regal living room. Doors always seem open; friends and assistants freely wander in and out, careful to avoid disturbing the few families still living in the other wing. “A good creative place,” the director says.
Guadagnino’s appreciation for incongruity began when he was a child and continued through his education. A month after he was born in Palermo, in 1971, his family moved to Ethiopia, where his Sicilian father taught history and Italian, returning home when Luca was 6. While at the University of Palermo, where he studied literature, he met Patrizia Allegra, a fixture of Sicily’s cultural scene. She would bring the then-19-year-old cinephile (with a particular fondness for Ingmar Bergman) along to dinner parties. At one, Guadagnino recalls, Allegra introduced him to the filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. “Patrizia said: ‘Oh, Monsieur Straub, Luca wants to be a director. What is your advice? Should he go to film school?’ Straub looked at me and said, ‘If you want to be a director then you are a film director. You don’t need to go to school. Don’t.’ ”
So he didn’t. Instead, Guadagnino moved to Rome and finished his degree in literature and cinema history at Sapienza University. While there he met Laura Betti, the muse of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. “I approached her in complete naïveté, and she said, ‘Come visit me,’ and we became friends — this big, nasty lady and this very skinny young man,” he says with a laugh. “I could cook very well, so she used me a lot — ‘You have to come now because I have guests!’ Everybody from Bernardo Bertolucci to Valerio Adami, the painter — these big personalities, together. That was my film school.”
Guadagnino eventually found his own muse in the film Caravaggio, directed by the British experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman. “I saw Tilda playing Lena,” he says. “I thought: Ahhh.” He eagerly sought out her films, and by the time Sally Potter’s Orlando came out in 1992, “I was obsessed.”
He wrote a script for a short film called The Penny Arcade Peepshow, inspired by William S. Burroughs’s writings, and sent a letter to Swinton, via her agent, asking if she’d star in it. He never heard back. A few months later he read that she was in Rome for an event. He went and “was staring at her like a stalker. Staring!” Guadagnino says, clearly amused by his youthful gaucherie. “After one hour, she said, ‘What can I do for you?’ ”
Somehow he convinced her to be in his film, and he pulled together money for her business-class ticket from London and kicked out his roommates so she could stay in his flat. “She was incredibly cool. The coolest,” he says. “After three days, she said, ‘We are going to be partners in crime and the crime is cinema.’ And we have become that.”
They never finished the film — he ran out of money. But she agreed to appear in his first feature, The Protagonists, which he now dismisses as a learning experience. Later she starred in I Am Love and A Bigger Splash. The former film established Guadagnino’s mature style, both as a filmmaker and a creator of environments of melancholic glamour. “Polished and refined are the last words I would use to describe his work, and I mean that as a high compliment,” Swinton says. “There is nothing smoothed away, hidden or suppressed. Rather, a proper rawness of sensibility and pulse, something pagan, profoundly wild.”
I Am Love is shot in the architect Piero Portaluppi’s masterpiece, the Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milan, and it is as much a star of the film as Swinton. Portaluppi, the Italian Modernist architect of choice to society in the 1920s and ’30s, was an obsessive perfectionist, much like Guadagnino. “We have no bedside tables because I can’t find any that I like yet,” he says. “My partner wants to kill me!”
The passionate cook had better luck in the kitchen, with a fishmonger’s stone sink from Genoa and a large cheese-maker’s table from a nearby village. The shelves are packed with international cookbooks. “I like to host — a lot,” he says.
Dinner parties are staged in the enclosed loggia that runs the length of the apartment, the mix of guests cast as carefully as his films. “You know when they say you need to put people who go well together?” Guadagnino asks. “I much prefer to put people who fight at the table. Then you have some sort of sparkle at the dinner!”
For one meal, friend and fellow director James Ivory filmed Guadagnino rolling and cutting fresh fettuccine on his pasta-maker. “Luca is no less commanding in the kitchen than on his set — tall, semi-bald, his hair flying up every which way,” Ivory says. Though Guadagnino usually cooks himself, on occasion he invites his friend Niko Romito, Abruzzo’s three-Michelin-star chef, to take charge. Then, the director says, everyone eats very well.
In the loggia, there is an accountant’s standing desk piled with garden books — evidence of yet another love, horticulture. Guadagnino tells me about a trip to Sweden last summer, to visit Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf’s Dream Park. “I told my friends, ‘We have to be there at 8 o’clock in the morning when the light is nicest.’ We land there and everyone is grumpy and then we turn and we are in front of this wonder, and everyone exhales. We spent two hours wandering around. I must admit, I had this slight attack of Stendhal Syndrome.”
He pauses and looks out the window onto the old, twisted plum tree that grows in the courtyard.
“The next house will have a garden.”
