The director and now designer Luca Guadagnino.
The new project by the filmmaker Luca Guadagnino is two rooms facing each other through a fourth invisible wall that could be a mirror, such is its symmetry.
Both feature similar elements and opposite details.
For example, one fireplace is made of
ceppo
, a very rare Lombard stone, and the other is made of ceramic colored in almost fluorescent tones.
The armchair on one side is upholstered in blue and the other in red.
They are, as befits an accomplished storyteller, rooms with a dramatic arc of their own: an
interior
thriller .
It is not surprising that the Italian mentions Hitchcock when explaining the narrative potential of decoration.
“I am interested in Hitchcock's ability to integrate spaces into his visual knowledge machine.
Everything in
Psycho
is architecture, from the interior of the car to the motel lobby”, he explains by videoconference from Boston, where he is shooting
Challenger
, his new film with Zendaya, Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist.
The shoot has prevented him from being in Milan during Design Week and, therefore, in this hypnotic double room that is the letter of introduction to Studio Luca Guadagnino, his interior design and architecture office.
He founded it in 2017, following two conversations.
One was with the journalist Dana Thomas, who visited him at her home in Crema de Ella to interview him for
T Magazine
.
Studio Luca Guadagnino project presented during Milan Design Week. Giulio Ghirardi
"He asked me about my greatest wish, and I told him that, at that moment, to be an interior designer," he recalls.
The other was businessman Federico Marchetti, who upon reading that interview commissioned him to renovate his house on Lake Como. “Both of them encouraged me to dare to think of myself as someone capable of working on this, and I started looking for collaborators , architects and interior designers to work with, despite not having specific studios”, he says.
"It's been a very instructive process."
In Accanto al fuoco, his debut as an interior designer, Guadagnino has paid "tribute to his fathers", he explains.
Fundamentally, the architect Carlo Scarpa, a key name in post-war Italian architecture, and the space he created for a retrospective of Antonello da Messina in 1953. The pleated panels that cover the walls of the room and intersect on the ceiling of the space devised by Guadagnino refer to that icon of the Italian imagination.
An imaginary to which Guadagnino has made relevant contributions –from the bourgeois majesty of Milan in
Io Sono l'Amore
(2009) to the ancestral paradise of
Call Me By Your Name
(2017)–, although he is allergic to aestheticism.
The kitchen in Federico Marchetti's house, a project designed by Luca Guadagnino.Giulio Ghirardi
“It is a reductionist vision of what I do, because I have not only worked in Italy, and I am not only talking about Italy,” he replies.
“Of course, I love my country and I wouldn't live anywhere else, but I don't think that's my role.
You have to see things through an idea of reality that cannot be complacent and always bathed in beauty.
It can be nostalgic, melancholic or political, but it is not limited to crystallizing a sense of beauty”.
In the series
We Are Who We Are
(HBO) he addressed issues related to identity or gender in a very free and very contemporary way.
Can this sensitivity be transferred to interior design?
"It's a question that leads to slippery slopes," he replies.
“I don't need to be included and I don't feel excluded, because I don't want to belong to what is called normality.
At the same time, I am not interested in systematizing the idea of gender in the Anglo-Saxon way.
I am more interested in subversion, mutability, contamination, discomfort.
For me, the
queer
it has to do with what is not predictable.
And it's too complex a subject to talk about lightly.
What I can say is that, for example, we have made a very geometric fireplace with ceramics.
And when you fire pottery, the shape changes slightly and doesn't quite fit the geometry you designed.
In addition, it is lacquered in bright colors ranging from pink to yellow, but also gray.
So maybe I could say that this fireplace reflects how those of us who don't believe in coding feel."
A shot of 'Call Me By Your Name' showing Guadagnino's love for design and interior design.
In any case, he is reluctant to draw parallels between his films and his interiors.
"The only effect is that, with interior design, I relax from the stress of making movies."
Does it make you happy to have decided to open your studio?
“Well, happiness is a word that we should not pronounce because it arouses melancholy.
It's from a poem by Sandro Penna.
That's my answer."
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