So if not on the Italian Riviera, now we know where:
Sirmione del Garda (southern end of Lake Garda),
90 km/56 mi from Crema, where Luca Guadagnino
lives and works in a 17th-century palazzo in the
center of town. Later!
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 HomeLuca 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.”
