Fringe benefits
Designer Lorenza Bozzoli’s flamboyant Milan home takes assertive strides into laissez-faire opulence, pitching an eye for couture with equal parts classicism and 1960s lounge lizard.
“I enjoy the pleasure of transforming what I see, trying not to have an ordinary vision”
LORENZA BOZZOLI
Lorenza Bozzoli is that rare species of style maven who manages to straddle the worlds of fashion, industrial and interior design without compromising her ‘cred’. She can intuit change, meld emotive concept with cool function and cut straight to the essence of another’s identity in her industry, all while investing that elusive something into a sleeper brand.
All the big guns of style have tapped her talent. From the tongue-in-cheek fashion experimentation of Fiorucci to the ‘bougie’ classicism of Basile; the trippy interior surrealism of Moooi to the humorous essentialism of Alessi; Bozzoli is acrobatic with her artistry. And it’s on full display — with all the fun of the circus — in her riotous Milan home.
Overlooking the square turrets of Sforza Castle — once home to Renaissance rulers — and sitting between the manicured order of Sempione Park and the artsy anarchy of the Brera district, the building was once the address of the Norwegian Consulate and then a company office before Bozzoli and her architect husband Piergiorgio Fasoli bought it.
“For years we had been looking for a home that could include Lorenza’s professional practice,” says Fasoli, who cuts that classic Milan figure of unconventionally cool conventionalism. “A home where we could receive friends and have an independent apartment for our son.”
Finding that requisite accommodation in Milan’s north-west dress circle was a prize, but Fasoli was particularly sold on the noble bones and base canvas of a property built in the early-20th century. It featured wide-span, park-framing windows and lofty walls that resonated with a century of history while affording the overlay of a new signature. The first order of restoration business was to bring all fixtures, stucco finishes and parquetry floors back to the crisp, classical modernity of their original making, in readiness for Bozzoli and Fasoli’s next-stage layering.
“There are two opportunities to express and represent yourself, your values, your pleasures and your ambitions,” says Bozzoli, who loudly answers to one of those opportunities in what she wears — today a changing parade of fluoro-pink pussy-bow blouse and canary-bright baby-doll dress. “The house reflects each of us… fashion expresses its own age, always evolving… I enjoy the pleasure of transforming what I see, trying not to have an ordinary vision.”
And boy, has she obviated ordinary in rooms seemingly animated by a cartoonist — highchroma colour coding the function of each space with all the tonal trigger of a wake-up call. The living room, awash with blue, might yell Smurf to any child of the 1980s, but the couple intended it as an ode to the clubby lounge scenes of the ’60s — the smoky, velvet-swathed worlds where jazz had a foothold but rock was starting to twist its way in.
Cartoon or club, the fluidity of association delights Bozzoli, who claims to have completed her first interior design project — her bedroom — at the age of eight. The youthful naivety exercised then still evidences in the surfeit of living-room pieces that she has designed for her own label, Lorenza Bozzoli Couture, as well as other brands. What unites her Gio Ponti-esque Wallie lamps for Tato, 1960s-slanting lights for Slamp, Amami fringed poufs for Moooi and her own ceramic-inlaid tiled tables is the fashion understanding that well-chosen, idiosyncratic accessories can elevate an outfit from nice to knockout. Layer a little memory-laced emotion over clean elegance and che bello!
The studio, where Bozzoli has scatter-gunned fabric samples, travel souvenirs, small sculptures and prototype drawings, is a mind-clearing white to minimise distraction from the business of design. The deep Deco-style fringing that swings so seductively at the base of her Couture poufs has been parlayed into screening for a console that props Bozzoli’s table lamps for Tato plus an endearing pastiche of primitivism in her feather-framed Wise Mirror Masks.
Counterpointing the studio’s tonal quiet with a hot-house exoticism in the bedroom, Bozzoli and Fasoli blanketed it in the lush greens of adjacent Sempione Park, wallpapering select panels with the large-motif palm leaves of Hermès Feuillage wallpaper. This covering’s tropical traceries, lifted from a Raoul Dufy gouache, slide into the deeper green of the bathroom, where a period panorama of South America’s Orinoco River, hand-painted by French company Ananbô, matches the rainforest green of marble slabs specified by Fasoli to amplify the vista’s immersive impact. To bathe in this space is to embark on a transcendental trip through place and time.
The need to take such adventure, if only into the restorative recesses of the mind, is never more pressing than now. No, Bozzoli may not worship at the clinical altar of modernist design — she swings too flamboyantly between the old and new — but she arguably looks to the liturgies of the late Gio Ponti, the Milan design saint who did a like-line in marrying camp-inflected fashion and formally taut classicism. “Enchantment — a useless thing,” he famously declared, “but as indispensable as bread.” lorenzabozzoli.com artemest.com/artisans/lorenza-bozzoli-design
“For years we had been looking for a home that could include Lorenza’s professional practice… a home where we could receive friends”
PIERGIORGIO FASOLI
“There are opportunities to express and represent yourself, your values, your pleasures and your ambitions”
LORENZA BOZZOLI