By Design takes a closer look at the world of design, in moments big and small.
IN THE FOOTHILLS of the Italian Alps, Villa Antonelli sits like a sugar cube on the western shore of Lake Como. Tommaso Spinzi, the Milan-based interior and furniture designer, recently completed a redecoration of the house, which was cast in concrete and covered in off-white plaster in 1959 by Luigi Zuccoli, a disciple of Guiseppe Terragni, one of the fathers of Rationalist architecture.
But though Spinzi, 41, was born and raised in Como, where Italian Rationalism was also born, he confesses that it wasn’t until he started the project that he learned the extent to which the movement is entrenched in his hometown. The fascist dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini, approved of Rationalism’s formulaic approach to order and proportion, and one of the most important architectural examples of the style, the 1936 Casa del Fascio — a white marble box with a grid of balconies designed by Terragni that some believe served as Mussolini’s headquarters until the National Fascist Party’s fall in 1943 — is just down the road. Villa Antonelli echoes that house’s spare symmetry; from the water, you can see its two stories of wide ribbon windows and notched terrace with its precise cutout at the top left corner. Zuccoli designed the villa for a doctor who had been given a small slice of prime waterfront land by a wealthy local family who wanted medical care close by. He would operate his practice and live there with his family for the next 50 years. The doctor’s son, a boatbuilder in a nearby village, inherited the house in 2019 and, the following year, entrusted its refurbishment to a relative, Gabriele Botta, Spinzi’s friend and collaborator. The pair decided to restore Villa Antonelli together; every weekend, one or the other would make the hourlong drive from Milan to the property.
“I wanted to fix the house but keep as much original as possible,” says Spinzi, who immediately began researching Zuccoli’s and Terragni’s work. During the pandemic, he cleared out 50 years’ worth of belongings from the villa while restoring Zuccoli’s trademark elements, including Palladiana-style Giallo Siena and Verdi Alpi marble floors, generous wooden furnishings and an abundance of zellige tiles in the bathrooms.
THE TOP TWO floors of the 2,583-square-foot house cantilever outward, creating the impression that it’s floating above the water. On the main floor, functional spaces like a small kitchen, a powder room and a stone staircase face the road. But the view from the entrance, which leads into an L-shaped living and dining room defined by a tripartite glass wall that runs the width of the house, frames the lake so perfectly that it resembles a postcard. Upstairs there are three small bedrooms, a terrace and a bathroom. The basement hosts a guest suite that once functioned as the doctor’s office. For the interiors, Spinzi curated a selection of furnishings from the time when the house was built. “I tried to find pieces from a similar era that were also connected to the lake,” he says, including a polished wooden bar cart with a curving handle from the Italian architect and designer Ico Parisi, who also lived in a home of his own design in Como.
In the whitewashed living room, armchairs by the Milanese architect and designer Gio Ponti — originally created in 1964 for the hotel Parco dei Principi in Rome — sit across from a leather sofa and a Willy Rizzo coffee table, both likely from the ’70s. On the wall opposite the panoramic windows, there’s a small, slashed ’60s canvas by the artist Lucio Fontana. And arranged on the original floor-to-ceiling bookcases are Spinzi’s collection of vintage glass lamps and vessels from the 1930s to the ’80s, including a Cubosfera table light by Alessandro Mendini, designed in 1968, which resembles a bubble trapped in an ice cube, and a shallow, mouth-blown blue bowl by Flavio Poli from the ’70s. In the dining area, located toward the back of the ground floor, are petal-shaped Medea chairs, designed by Vittorio Nobili in 1950, arranged around a circular glass-and-metal table of Spinzi’s design.
Each of the upstairs bedrooms is dedicated to a different color — a foil to the home’s classically Rationalist white facade. Spinzi painted the largest room, which faces the lake, a chocolaty brown and decorated it with furniture such as an Osvaldo Borsani bed with a branchlike headboard by the sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro. In the smallest bedroom, he covered the walls with a pattern that he designed for the Italian wallpaper company Wall & Decò, an abstraction of teal-and-forest green shapes that was inspired by views of Como. He then added a chair of his own design, constructed of matte green painted metal, and a black lacquered desk from the ’50s. The bedroom nearest to the street is bathed in a floor-to-ceiling cobalt blue-and-white geometric mural and includes a wardrobe by Ponti, a ’50s chrome armchair by the Italian architect and designer Giotto Stoppino reupholstered in white bouclé from the Milanese textile house Dedar and a desk and light fixture from Spinzi’s Meccano line of furniture, made of blackened sheets of metal with circular cutouts.
During the crowded summer months on the lake, Spinzi and Botta host dinners for friends on the stone-lined terrace next to the deep-green water. In the off-season, Spinzi likes to travel alone to Villa Antonelli, where he dreams, naps and sketches on the balcony. But although the house may now be transformed, his own relationship to it, and to its surroundings, will never be complete. “It’s always evolving,” he says. “Now somehow I see things differently compared to when I was a child.”
The post On Italy’s Lake Como, a Rationalist Villa With a Contemporary Touch appeared first on New York Times.
