Private house

The interest for contemporary art is growing in the present-day society. The emerging tendency seems to be to replace products with experiences: less shopping, and more stimuli for the eyes, the ears and the mind. Contemporary art helps us to look at the facts of life with other eyes and from other perspectives. Unlike the financial markets, the art market deals with works whose significance and allure are not limited to promises of profits, as they also offer opportunities to understand the world we live in and, to some extent, ourselves. There are not many experiences that, like art, succeed in combining them with the cognitive and affective mechanisms of everyday life. This is the kind of experience one may have in this renovated home in a building from the early years of the Twentieth century, owned by a young couple of passionate aficionados of contemporary art and design. The apartment is fluid and open; every room flows into the next and the indoor areas open to the outdoor ones through the new loggia. Created by stealing the space from the apartment, it acts as filter to the internal garden and gives the ample entrance area
a new spatial quality. Space means freedom and flexibility. Everything inside this apartment has been designed on the basis of the specific suggestions of a simple and elegant line of thought.
The final goal has been to enhance the beauty of the building by exploiting the existing elements. Thanks to the continuity between ceiling, walls and floors the interior looks extremely abstract and even more specious than it is. (walls in cement-resin, floors in cement-resin and oak finished by hand). The limited but carefully studied modifications have served to restore the abstract beauty of the original structure. The only extraneous architectural elements, one of the many objects inhabiting this interior, is the white parallelepiped containing the wardrobe and the bathroom of Alberto’s room. It is crowned by Mario Merz’s “Fibonacci sequence”. In the bottom of the only corridor a large work by Kapoor, placed behind a large pivot-hung door, divides the master bedroom from the bathroom. The artificial lighting and the air conditioning are installed in thin channels in the floor and ceiling, and tend to reconcile and balance the different requirements of the works of art and of the inhabitants. Daylight is filtered by thin roll-up membranes. A few meters from the kitchen the dining room opens up; it is intimate, with a circular plan and is dominated by the large ceiling lamp whose interior is reflected by the mirroring surface of the table. The challenge: reconciling a vast collection of contemporary art works with everyday life. The danger: that the home might become an art gallery. The result: that the gallery has become a home. In other words, the art works have given the large rooms a certain “domestic intimacy”.