Thursday, July 1, 2010

VILLA NECCHI CAMPIGLIO

I just saw Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, staring Tilda Swinton. An Italian melodrama full of passion, haute cuisine, chic fashion and Milanese architecture, the film features the Villa Necchi Campiglio, an imposing home built between 1932-35 in an art deco meets rationalist (also known as fascist) style. The movie was fantastic, for many reasons, but the production design by Francesca Di Mottola is utterly phenomenal.
Di Mottola and Guadagnino show Milan in all it's sharp, aloof grayness. The house is a brick an mortar incarnation of the strange, intensely private and intensely privileged lives of the industrial elite in northern Italy. Everything that feels vaguely depressing and oppressive about the city seems honed into a glossy marble slab in the film. The house is currently a museum open to the public, but for filming was made into a rich, luxurious series rooms that, one after another, each seem to invent yet another shade of brown. I can't get it out of my head!

I cannot wait to visit the house the next time I am in Milan, and I will most definitely be seeing the movie again to soak up the visuals a second time. For more images and information, check out the T magazine article written by Armand Limnander.

Images via travelpod and habituallychic.blogspot.com

2 comments:

  1. Okay, what's the exquisite Pantheon-Hagia Sophia type building at the end??

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