The most interesting house in Milan, to judge from the number of times it has featured in glossy magazines, belongs to Barnaba Fornasetti.
The house was built by Barnaba's grandfather, Pietro Fornasetti, around 1900. The
NY Times glosses him as a "typewriter importer," but that's either a grotesque simplification of his career or an outright joke, since I doubt anybody made this kind of money just importing typewriters. I lean toward joke, for reasons that will become clear to you.
The house owes its character to Pietro's son, Piero Fornasetti. Piero was a designer, one of those vaguely artistic characters who would decorate (and sell) aboslutely anything: wallpaper, ceramics, furniture, matchboxes, magazine covers, fabrics, mustard jars. Above is one in one his wallpaper designs that you can still buy.
And here are two of his ceramic plates. He was interested in surrealism, but his work doesn't fit into any particular category; to me it looks like he was aiming for the intersection of "sellable" and "weird."
There are many works by Piero in the house today. This assemblage of butterfly stuff focuses on one of his paintings,
The Butterfly Seller (1938).
The bathroom is lined with Fornasetti tiles.
The music room, Barnaba's personal sanctum. Tour guides love taking people into this room because you enter through the back of a giant wardrobe, extra tall because it once held the capes of mounted police.
There are many other such touches in the house: trapdoors, hidden rooms,
a very tall stack of old auction catalogs,
and lots and lots of stuff. You have to love the oriental slippers left by the bed in the guest bedroom.
Quite over the top, so much so that you wonder how anyone lives here.
On the other hand, the breakfast nook is amazing.
And I think it's good that there's stuff in the world too crazy for me.
2 comments:
The NY Times glosses him as a "typewriter importer," but that's either a grotesque simplification of his career or an outright joke, since I doubt anybody made this kind of money just importing typewriters. I lean toward joke, for reasons that will become clear to you.
I wouldn't be so sure. He built the house in 1900, but had to have made his money before then to afford it. The decade or so leading up to the turn of the century was when typewriters were exploding onto the global market.
I think a home computer importer during the and 1990s could have easily afforded such a house, so its no great stretch to me to think that a typewriter importer in the 1890s could have done the same. Both were selling high-end, high-tech machines that not just anyone could produce, which were (correctly) hailed as revolutionary and the wave of the future, spurring constantly growing demand and commanding rather healthy prices.
In particular, it was only in 1896 that typewriter design began to be unified, based around the Underwood 1 design - prior to that, they came in a huge variety of strange shapes and layouts; but the Underwood set the standard for all typewriters to come. You might compare it to the IBM Personal Computer, or to the Ford Model T, etc.
And here are two of his ceramic plates. He was interested in surrealism, but his work doesn't fit into any particular category; to me it looks like he was aiming for the intersection of "sellable" and "weird."
So... "kitsch"?
I love the plate set of the Pantheon!
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