The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
House style
Fashionable furnishings
WHEN BOTTEGA VENETA showed its autumn/winter 2018 collections during New York Fashion Week last month – a one-season-only event for the Milan-based brand – creative director Tomas Maier chose a particularly special venue. The company’s newest and biggest store, or ‘maison’, occupies three 19th-century town houses on Madison Avenue – and maison is, indeed, the operative word: above four floors of clothing and accessories, the fifth storey, dubbed The Apartment, is set up to resemble a private home and decorated with the brand’s latest furniture collection.
As is often the way with fashion/interiors crossovers, Bottega Veneta’s furniture line came into being, back in 2006, because Maier was unable to find the specific furniture he wanted for his stores. He commissioned bespoke pieces, which customers then wanted to buy. Since then, the line has become synonymous with quiet elegance – Maier has said that furniture should be ‘invisible’ – and luxurious materials. The new pieces include sofas in grey or olive-green suede, a glamorous bronze drum pendant light, a crocodile-skin stool and a stuffed, soft director’s chair.
Maier is the son of an architect and has been inspired by the store’s environs in its interior design: shiny metallic elements, such as a brushed-brass ceiling, reference Manhattan skyscrapers; the soft green decor of The Apartment is a nod to the rivers surrounding the city.
Completing the picture of the highend home is a rotating exhibition of art curated by Maier and the Robilant + Voena gallery, most dating from the 1960s and ’70s. ‘The period was very experimental and forward-thinking, but it’s not that well known in the US,’ says the designer. ‘I like that we can show people something they might not have seen.’
The new furniture collection will be officially launched at the Salone del Mobile in Milan next month