Interiors

It was the night the lights went out that Carla Sozzani realised just how influential she’d become. On that day in March 1999 — nine years after founding 10 Corso Como, arguably the world’s first concept store, on an unremarkable thoroughfare on the northern edge of Milan — she was putting the finishing touches on an exhibition in the space when the neighbourhood went dark. “I called the city,” Sozzani recalls, “and they told me, ‘Carla, you’re going to be very happy, the power is off because the construction work has started. Corso Como is going to be a pedestrian street from now on.’” By putting down roots outside of Milan’s centre, Sozzani had forced its fashionable shoppers out of their comfort zone, and like-minded businesses had followed suit. Suddenly, this tract of city was the most exciting place to be.

Nearly 25 years later, Corso Como, the avenue, has evolved into a fashion and nightlife hub against a backdrop of newly erected skyscrapers. “There was a greengrocer there and not much else,” she says of the area when she first arrived. Her plan at the time was to open a gallery that would exhibit the work — including images by photographers like Paolo Roversi, Sarah Moon and David Bailey — that she’d fallen in love with during her 20 years in magazines. (She became the founding editor in chief of Italian Elle in 1987, and after that the director of special editions for Vogue Italia, where her younger sister, Franca Sozzani, was the editor in chief until she died in 2016.) But bit by bit she kept adding on: In 1991, she opened a boutique on the gallery floor selling forward-thinking fashion lines like Maison Martin Margiela, Comme des Garçons and Alaïa; that same year, just upstairs, came a bookstore devoted to art and design; in 1998, she debuted a cafe serving simple Italian food; and in 2003, she took over a stack of apartments in a building across the shop’s courtyard and transformed them into a three-bedroom hotel. Sozzani likes to compare 10 Corso Como to an Italian piazza. “Everything you need is inside,” she explains. “You just need a drawbridge to close yourself in.”

From the start, 10 Corso Como’s concept and visual identity have been the joint product of Sozzani and the American artist Kris Ruhs, to whom Sozzani was introduced on a trip to New York in 1989 and who has now been her partner for 31 years (his work was the subject of the gallery’s first exhibition in 1990). Ruhs designed the store’s hand-scrawled logo, and its interiors are filled with his playful sketches, elaborate curtain-like wall hangings made of painted Plexiglas and black-and-white cloudlike paper mobiles. He has also had a hand in shaping the apartment the couple share on a leafy boulevard in northwest Milan.

Sozzani tells me the story of the blackout on a scorching July afternoon while sitting on a grey-and-white Osaka sofa by Pierre Paulin, which is surrounded by piles of art books and exhibition catalogs, in her and Ruhs’s cavernous sitting room. A former 1930s-era office, the home has herringbone parquet floors and bright white walls that are contrasted by a veritable crush of art and objects. When she purchased the U-shaped unit in 1986, Sozzani demolished most of its compact rooms to create a single open living space, punctuated by the occasional load-bearing partition wall. On this day, she is, as always, impeccably dressed, in a pristine white Alaïa shirtdress, pressed black trousers (“Dior, from the Galliano era,” she says) and studded leather sandals, also Alaïa. With a pale, almond-shaped face and a sly grin, her countenance is part Modigliani muse, part manga heroine, and framed by long blond waves tied at the nape of her neck with a velvet ribbon.

In the living room, which looks out onto a lush private garden, the walls are covered with Ruhs’s monumental mixed-media reliefs constructed largely from found materials like metal, rope and paper in black and white with the occasional fleck of red or blue. In the adjacent dining area, a glass-topped table with an interlocking carved wooden base of Ruhs’s design sits beneath a cluster of his raku ceramic pendant lights, which resemble bulbous jack-o’-lanterns. And in the hallway, which acts as an informal gallery space leading to the couple’s bedroom and private quarters, there are a spindly black chair, a chrome concave seat and two wavelike plexiglass chaise longues, all made by Ruhs and arranged next to a black-and-white Joe Colombo tube chair. Ruhs even had a carpenter build the kitchen to his specifications, using wooden boards painted in his signature polka dots and loopy hand-drawn forms in lieu of a conventional backsplash.

Sozzani describes her decorating ethos as combining “layers and layers of life.” Thus, the home is also a palimpsest of her long career spent at the nexus of the worlds of fashion, art and design, and nearly everything in it has a story to tell. As we’re talking, a spotted Bengal cat leaps onto the sofa, nuzzles my knuckle and announces herself with a loud meow. “She was Azzedine’s,” Sozzani tells me, referring to the designer Azzedine Alaïa, who was one of her closest friends. “I took her after he passed. She’s named Lola, after [Julian] Schnabel’s daughter,” she adds, pausing to stroke the cat’s skinny tail.

Many of the furnishings have similarly rich histories. The Pierre Paulin sofa, for example, which she found in the ’90s at the Clignancourt flea market in Paris, is the exact model later re-editions are based on. “Pierre came here in the 1990s to take the measurements,” she recalls of the pioneering French designer, who died in 2009. “His own version had been lost over the years.”

In the ’80s, Sozzani socialised with Ettore Sottsass, the founder of the Italian postmodern design collective the Memphis Group, among whose members she discovered another of her favourite creative talents. “Ettore, his wife Barbara and I spent so many nights together singing and drinking. That’s how I met Shiro Kuramata,” she says, referring to the Japanese industrial designer. She keeps one of his iconic Miss Blanche chairs — a straight-backed armchair, made from clear acrylic resin in which roses are suspended as in amber, that was inspired by the protagonist of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 play “A Streetcar Named Desire” — in her dressing room. “I use it every day,” she says. “When I put my socks on, when I put my shoes on. It reminds me of those times.” She also has a rare Kuramata prototype, an early version of his curvy Side One drawers in rough, unvarnished plywood instead of the usual black-and-white ebonised ash and steel, a set of which she also owns. When Giulio Cappellini, the art director of the Milan-based design firm Cappellini, took over Kuramata’s archive, she tells me, “I convinced him to sell me the original.”

But her first love in furniture will always be the Danish midcentury designer Arne Jacobsen. “His Cylinda tea set was the first piece I collected in the 1970s,” she says of the 1967 stainless steel service, which features a tall cylindrical pot with a spout sprouting from the base like the arm of a Saguaro cactus. “It’s very beautiful, but totally useless.” She went on to amass an army of his fluidly formed chairs (a smooth, curved white Egg chair, designed in 1958, sits in the corner of the living room, offsetting the rough surfaces of Ruhs’s reliefs). “I think the purity of the shapes is what attracts me,” she says. “They’re very sensual. There is nothing forced.” Her zeal for his work even led the Danish design brand Fritz Hansen to enlist Sozzani to collaborate a relaunch of Jacobsen’s bent plywood Series 7 chair last year. Perhaps surprisingly, given the restrained palette of her home, the collection features 16 new colors, ranging from muted pink to forest green, that were inspired by a vibrant storefront Sozzani saw on a trip to India.

These days, though, most of her Jacobsen collection lives at her office at 10 Corso Como where, as our conversation winds down, she plans to return for the remainder of the afternoon. Thirty years after opening its doors, Sozzani is as dedicated to the store as ever and is still planning its expansion. She is currently preparing, for example, to add a space for pop-up design exhibitions, which will open during the Salone del Mobile furniture fair in September, to the already sprawling compound. “10 Corso Como is where I spend most of my time,” she says. “It will always be my first home.”

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On a Sunday afternoon in January, high-pitched shrieks and deep howls could be heard emanating from an elegant Art Deco building in Berlin’s Charlottenburg neighborhood. Their source was the third-floor office of Blau International, a large-format art magazine whose contributors include the French interiors photographer François Halard, the French fashion stylist Marie Chaix and the German astrologer Alexander von Schlieffen. Published twice a year in English by the German media group Axel Springer and overseen by founding editor in chief Cornelius Tittel, 46, the nine-year-old magazine has recently run such stories as an essay by the Austrian novelist Peter Handke about the 17th-century French artist Nicolas Poussin and one by Tittel himself on the psychedelic work of the young Parisian painter Pol Taburet.

“Now scream as loud as you can, with your whole being,” encouraged Tittel that Sunday, dressed in white and sitting cross-legged at the front of one of the five grand rooms that make up Blau’s headquarters. Almost 40 people, many of them also dressed in white, responded with a cacophony of wails. Someone’s pet Pomeranian began to bark. Making the scene more dramatic still was the room’s décor: two dozen animal skin paintings hung on the walls, which, reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s tinfoil-clad Factory, were covered almost entirely with the silvery Mylar blankets often used by recovering marathon runners. Behind Tittel was a six-foot-high omega-shaped altar made of melted white plastic and finished with two small gnome-like figurines.

Was this an editorial meeting? An art happening? It was in fact one of the semiprivate Kundalini yoga and meditation events that Tittel has been hosting for the past year in his magazine’s workplace, attracting some of the better-known figures in Berlin’s art scene — among them the gallerist Philomene Magers of Sprüth Magers and the collector and author Angelika Taschen. Tittel, said Taschen, “manages to combine the best of two complex worlds, art and Kundalini, both of which are connected to our higher selves.”

Beside being the venue for these sessions, which take place each Thursday and on occasional Sundays, and are open to Tittel’s friends and their friends, the Blau office distinguishes itself from other workplaces — even those of art magazines — in different ways, too. Once the private home of the media mogul Axel Springer — whose namesake publishing company has remained one of Germany’s most influential since his death in 1985 — the neglected turn-of-the-century space was turned over to Tittel and his small team in 2015. “When I was asked to take on the project that became Blau, I said I would do it if I could work in beautiful surroundings and not in the main corporate headquarters,” explained Tittel, who was previously the deputy editor of Springer’s Welt Group, the division of publications and businesses related to the daily newspaper Die Welt. (The company’s main campus is across the city in the Mitte neighborhood, on a street named after Springer.)

Tittel brought in his friend the Berlin-based interior designer Irina Kromayer, and on a relatively small budget they transformed the 2,800-square-foot apartment into a contemporary work space filled with midcentury furniture — some of it left over from Springer’s occupancy — and art by Tittel’s circle of collaborators. The entrance hall, which like all the rooms has honey-colored parquet floors and ornate moldings, is decorated with bold scribbles by the German abstract artist Peppi Bottrop. The ceiling of the grand salon, now used as a library and meeting room, is covered with canvas panels upon which the Czech-German artist Jiri Georg Dokoupil made paintings using colored soap bubbles. (“There was a faded fresco with flying angels there before and it was awful,” said Tittel.) Monumental Plexiglas chandeliers designed by the German American architecture firm Barkow Leibinger and resembling giant clusters of icicles hang in two rooms. And with the last remaining euros of the renovation funds, another friend of Tittel’s, the New York-based interior designer Ricky Clifton, bought a stack of cheap synthetic carpets, cut them into irregular shapes and spray-painted the edges of some in contrasting shades before distributing them throughout the space.

Last spring, Tittel converted the final room, Springer’s onetime bedroom, into a yoga studio, incorporating works by the Berlin-based artist Raphaela Vogel. “I had already purchased some of her animal skin paintings and then I saw a picture of a gate she’d made of white polyurethane, guarded by garden gnomes, and she agreed to lend it to me,” Tittel explained recently over the phone from Munich, where he was helping the German artist Georg Baselitz curate a retrospective of his prints.

Tittel’s transformation into a teacher of Kundalini — a form of yoga influenced by Tantric practices that emphasizes chanting and repetitive poses said to open the body’s chakras — began at the start of the pandemic. He was going through a breakup with his wife, and a friend, the hotelier and T contributing editor Philomena Schurer Merckoll, suggested he try a class. The experience resonated so deeply with Tittel that two weeks later he started a teacher training course with Panch Nishan, a Berlin-based American practitioner who now occasionally joins Tittel’s sessions. On this particular Sunday, she led the closing meditation, instructing those in the room to “open the lotus flower of your heart,” while Anne Thieltges, another yogi who often assists Tittel, sounded a large gong. At the end of the meditation, Nishan thanked Tittel for fostering this growing community — one that has also informed his work at the magazine. Since taking up yoga, Tittel said, he has experienced some “beautiful chance connections and unexpected opportunities.”

Springer was politically and socially conservative; in the late ’60s his newspaper Bild was protested by thousands of demonstrators following what critics saw as its hostile coverage of the West German student movement. But when asked to imagine what Springer would think of the yoga classes now being held in his former bedroom, Tittel responded that the publishing magnate had esoteric beliefs of his own: He often consulted an astrologer, and at the end of his life he spent time on the Greek island of Patmos to be close to the monastery of St. John the Divine. Tittel added that a few months after he installed Vogel’s works, the office nearly burned down when two of the animal skin paintings, which were covering a lamp, started to smoke. “Not long afterward, the gate sculpture cracked and fell over and I had to have Raphaela come to restore it,” he explained. “She said, ‘I think we’re shaking up some ghosts in here.’”

In the heart of Naples, Italy, a city whose peeling jewel-toned apartment buildings and Baroque churches often call to mind a faded but still glorious opera set, there is a 25-acre private park so lush and tranquil, it feels more like an enchanted woodland. Though it is mostly wild — a tangle of holm oaks, palms and flowering acanthuses intersected by a few winding trails — at its centre is a romantic neoclassical marble fountain carved in the early 1800s. Positioned above a shallow pool, two winged figures — Hymen, the ancient Greek god of marriage ceremonies, and Eros, the mischievous god of carnal desire — gaze at each other over a decorative urn. “Both the stillness of this place and this fountain are so sacred to me,” says the artist and jewellery designer Margherita Marzotto, 32, admiring the work as if for the first time.

But Marzotto, in fact, spent her childhood summers playing hide-and-seek in this garden. The property — which also includes Villa Lucia, a palatial Bourbon-era house — was developed by Ferdinand I, the king of the Two Sicilies, as a home for himself and his new wife, Lucia Migliaccio, the Duchess of Floridia, in 1817. “Their relationship was quite a scandal at the time, partly because they married only two months after the king’s first wife died,” says Marzotto. “And the villa was their love pavilion.” After passing among several subsequent owners, the estate has been in Marzotto’s family for almost a century and has cast a spell over her for as long as she can remember — not least since 2016, when she and her husband, Barthélémy d’Ollone, 41, a French musician and gem hunter, began living in the house for part of each year.

Constructed in 1807 and updated by the government minister Cristoforo Saliceti not long after, the structure was built into a steep slope just below the garden, in the city’s hilltop Vomero neighbourhood. Under Ferdinand’s direction, it was transformed by the architect Antonio Niccolini into a grand two-storey manor in which the king and his wife could both escape and entertain. Accordingly, the house has two radically different faces. The fanciful northern facade with views of the park is modelled after that of a Doric temple preserved in the ruins of Pompeii, roughly 30 kilometres southeast. Fronted by five nine-metre-tall fluted columns, its stone and stucco surface is covered with otherworldly frescoes depicting cherubs, angels, swooping red-and-blue birds and mythological creatures. “That one’s a hippocamp,” Marzotto says, pointing to an animal with the upper body of a stallion and the lower body of a fish. “They were said to be the horses of Poseidon.”

The villa’s southern facade is more restrained. Painted pale butter yellow, it is decorated only by a series of stone reliefs set above the seven shuttered French doors that line a narrow upper balcony. A second, wider terrace, bordered by leafy hedges and oleander trees, extends from the ground floor toward the hillside. As we stand there, it is immediately clear why Niccolini made this side of the building relatively unassuming: There was no point in competing with the vista beyond it. Spread out some 180 metres below is the city’s historic harbour, with its medieval fortifications and park-lined waterside avenues and, beyond it, stretching to the horizon, is the Bay of Naples, bookended to the east by the bruised purple slopes of Vesuvius and to the west by the hazy, rugged form of Ischia. “We still marvel at this view every time we’re here,” says d’Ollone.

Much like Naples itself, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, the house is a place where the layers of time seem unusually, tantalisingly porous. In the 16th century, the land on which Villa Lucia now stands was a place of prayer for an order of Benedictine monks; d’Ollone likes to imagine that, before that, it was the site of a pagan temple. “One feels a deep sense of calm here,” he says, adding with a laugh, “it’s the only corner of the world in which Margherita and I don’t argue.”

Marzotto’s great-grandfather Italo de Feo, an Italian politician and intellectual, bought the 700-square-metre villa in the 1920s from one of the heirs of the industrialist and art collector Alfonso Garofalo, converting it into a salon of sorts. He changed very little inside, preferring to keep its rooms spare and open. With his death in 1985, the house passed to Marzotto’s maternal grandmother, the late senator and journalist Diana de Feo, who filled it with cosy seating areas and artwork she picked up on her travels, using it as a place to host both fellow dignitaries and family members. And while Marzotto herself grew up on a rural estate outside Venice, she soon became enraptured by Naples. “The energy here is stronger, more dramatic than in the north,” she says. “The city has a wild elegance that has always fascinated me.”

Indeed, it’s these two places — Villa Lucia and Naples — that inspire the fantastical designs of Ollone & Ollone, the fine jewellery house Marzotto founded with d’Ollone and his brother Melchior in 2016. For the last several years, the villa has served as a temporary base for the couple — when they’re not in Naples, they divide their time between Paris and Hong Kong — as well as for their business. It is here that Marzotto, working either at a desk facing the distant island of Capri or at a table on one of the home’s terraces, sketches each numbered piece — whether a gold ring featuring a 10-carat Ethiopian emerald encased in a setting that resembles the centre of a poppy or one with a three-carat neon blue-green Paraíba tourmaline from Brazil embraced by coral-like gold tentacles — before it is handmade by master artisans in Paris, Naples or Bangkok.

At the core of the company is its founders’ dedication to redefining what is truly precious. The d’Ollone brothers began sourcing rare stones from small mines (alexandrite from Russia, Mahenge spinel from Tanzania) 15 years ago, typically selling them to collectors. Not long after Marzotto met d’Ollone in 2014 at a carnival party in Venice, she joined one of the brothers’ trips to Madagascar, where they worked directly with the country’s miners to buy Santa Maria aquamarines at fair prices. The journey inspired Marzotto to make a pendant using one of the stones, whose colour reminded her of the waters around Capri, and gold she’d panned for alongside women from a village in which the group had stayed. She went on to study goldsmithing under Gerard Courcoux, a now-retired master jeweller who often supplied pieces to the king of Thailand, and soon she and the d’Ollones realised that their skills would be best applied producing their own designs — ones that would express Marzotto’s creativity and represent a new form of luxury, defined by respect for the environment and for the work of skilled craftspeople. “How nature creates such a diversity of colours is a miracle. Once you start learning about gemstones, you become obsessed,” says Marzotto, lifting her hand to show me one of the brand’s early pieces, a ring inspired by the story from Greek mythology of the nymph Daphne’s transformation into a tree. At the centre of its delicate gold band — sculpted to resemble unfurling branches — is an 11-carat spessartite stone the colour of an Aperol spritz. “There are also diamonds hidden in its most secret nooks,” she says.

The promise of unseen treasures defines the villa, as well. The home’s upper level consists almost entirely of two large, connected salons. The first, a more intimate space carpeted with worn Persian rugs, is filled with 18th- and 19th-century furniture (barrel-back wooden armchairs carved with mermaids and upholstered in powder blue silk; a crooked white Murano glass chandelier) that the Marzottos purchased with the house and have kept in the family. The lilac-painted walls are adorned with formal landscape paintings and portraits of European royals (King Charles III, Ferdinand I). Originally intended for entertaining guests, the room is where the couple like to read and work. “This is our TV,” jokes d’Ollone, pointing to an ornate 18th-century carved wooden Neapolitan cabinet set atop a matching table with decorative turned legs. When opened, the cabinet reveals a painted backdrop of a hunting scene and a tiny stage, set with rare porcelain figurines of soldiers on horseback, flute-playing cherubs and wine-pouring women made by the city’s renowned Capodimonte ceramics factory. The piece inspired the design of the brilliant red silk-covered jewellery boxes, each resembling a miniature theatre, in which Ollone & Ollone presents its creations.

The second living room — a grand hall with a grey-and-white terrazzo floor and a copy of the Italian Baroque painter Guido Reni’s majestic 1614 ceiling fresco, “L’Aurora,” which depicts Apollo driving his horse-drawn chariot into the dawn — is divided into multiple seating areas. Across from an ornate 18th-century gilded desk and chair, two long cornflower blue gingham couches face each other over a low wooden table heaped with books, and near one of the French windows is a mahogany grand piano that was made for King Ferdinand. “When my mother was young,” Marzotto says, “this room was almost completely empty except for the piano and a monumental Aubusson tapestry commissioned by the king in the early 1800s and used as a carpet.”

The ground floor of the house, reached by a marble staircase lined with prints purchased by Marzotto’s grandmother at a Paris flea market, is more informal. A large bedroom, which features a pair of Napoleonic-era four-poster beds and a bust of Seneca by the late 19th-century sculptor Vincenzo Gemito, overlooks the bay. And two smaller bedrooms, both of which double as libraries, flank a sunny dining room whose walls are painted with a neoclassical mural of pigeons and woodcocks flying amid wreaths and swagged garlands of flowers. In the middle of the space, a large oval wood table, inlaid with onyx, stands near a carved white marble fireplace. The comparatively small kitchen — whose walls and old-fashioned wood cabinets are painted a faded sage green — is down a long, narrow hallway, a remnant of a time when, like those of many grand houses, the room was used only by servants. “At some point, we’d like to have a big kitchen on the top floor where the salons are,” says d’Ollone. “We love to cook and, these days, the kitchen is usually the heart of a house.”

For now, though, when he and Marzotto entertain at Villa Lucia, it is generally on one of the terraces. Once a year — typically in spring or fall, when the weather is warm — the couple invite a small group of Ollone & Ollone’s customers and friends to spend several days in Naples, during which the pair take them to places in the city that have inspired their work. The brand’s first collection referenced Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s marble sculpture “Apollo and Daphne” (1622-25), and so Marzotto and d’Ollone organised a treasure hunt that led their guests to Baroque artworks across Naples. The second year, the collection alluded to the sirens that in Homer’s “Odyssey” swim in the Gulf of Naples: The couple arranged a mermaid-themed tour of the area that included a visit to the famous 19th-century mermaid-shaped fountain in the Piazza Sannazaro and a boat trip to the tiny island of Procida. But more than these excursions, it is the intimate alfresco meals at Villa Lucia — when the couple serve local dishes such as ricotta-stuffed zucchini-flower fritters and penne alla Nerano at long, candlelit tables while musicians play their favourite old-school Italian songs — that tend to make an indelible impression on guests. “True luxury is not an expensive dinner at a restaurant,” says d’Ollone as he looks out over the bay from the home’s upper terrace. “It’s the contrast of a wild garden growing in the centre of a busy city or of enjoying the simplest food while looking at this view.”