Factory Girl
Patrizia Moroso’s two-storey house in italy reveals a childhood love of warehouse spaces and an affinity for unusual style combinations
As the child of two parents who were working hard to build up Moroso, the renowned Italian brand for designer furniture, Patrizia Moroso spent most of her childhood in a factory and grew to feel at home in large industrial spaces. “We didn’t have a babysitter, so I spent a lot of time with them in the factory, where I would be sitting on the f loor making clothes for my dolls,” says Patrizia, who is now Moroso’s art director. “Even now, when I close our factory and office at the end of the day and am about to head home, I sometimes look around and think, ‘I can sleep here’.” This is reflected in her two-storey house in Udine, a small town in Italy’s FriuliVenezia Giulia region, where high ceilings and industrial fittings are juxtaposed with floor-to-ceiling windows and an eclectic mix of brightly coloured furniture. The house, which Patrizia shares with her husband and three children, is a living museum of sorts for the brand, filled with prototypes that are special to her. Patrizia calls the prototypes “nice mistakes” and has paired them with furniture that she picked up from her travels around the world – whether it be antique furniture from China, items she found in India, or the decorative tables she picked up from Greece. “I love the beauty of chaos and I love to mix and match,” she says. “When I work from home, I surround my work space with different swatches of fabric and I get inspiration from that.” With her home being such a showcase for the brand, Moroso created an At Home 2014 catalogue – where the current collections are arranged among Patrizia’s own furniture for the photo shoot, while in the background are her husband’s artworks that adorn the walls all around the house.
“My home is very much a source of inspiration for me,” says Patrizia. “The pictures from the catalogues are ref lective of my life. Sometimes, I have clients who ask if I could produce the same ambience in their home, especially as I use a lot of bold colours in the decor.” Patrizia’s favourite feature is the f loor-to-ceiling windows that cover the entire southwest side of the house, drawing in light and views of their garden. “The views are beautiful, especially during the autumn or when it is raining.” The floor-to-ceiling windows combined the outdoor and indoor areas into one vast, airy space. “We respected the boundaries of the garden as much as possible, when we were building the house. The house is very open. It was important to us that the architecture allows the nature to ‘come into’ the house and be part of the decor. “We are only seven minutes away from downtown Udine but my home feels like a place that is far away from the city.” The effect from the vast windows is not disturbed by clutter and practical storage units, which were all built into the walls. The views of the garden also helped soften up the rooms, which have the characteristic configuration, plain walls and high ceiling height of an industrial space. “Having grown up in a factory, I feel quite at home in such surroundings. It
is quite normal for me to live in warehouse-like spaces,” says Patrizia. “I love the proportions, the basic elementary spaces.” The entire house, which includes six bedrooms, two kitchens, two living rooms and a recreation room, along with a sauna area and small swimming pool, also features factory-friendly colours such as slate grey and black on the walls, so it doesn’t clash with the brightly coloured furniture and the paintings. The utilitarian colour scheme is a good contrast to the carpeting, where mats of different colours, textures and patterns overlap each other, ref lecting Patrizia’s love for unexpected combinations. “I find it beautiful. It is what you see when you are in a souk, as it is the traditional way to use carpets in the Middle East. The carpets are always put one over another, as they are all in a certain size but they need to cover a bigger area.” “I love to mix styles from different parts of the world. You have to be inspired by your life and that can come from your trips around the
world. There is always something from a trip that makes you happy and you have to use that,” says Patrizia. “Your house is a mirror of your life. You have to take all your experiences from it and put them in the place where you live.” Moroso is available at Starhill Gallery, Kuala Lumpur.
“Your house is a mirror of your life, you have to take all your experiences from it and put them in the place where you live”