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

SUNNY ONE BEDROOM

I have been consumed lately trying to find a subletter for my former apartment in Williamsburg, where I still hold the lease. I spent the entire weekend painting, fixing up, and cleaning up behind the last person who subletted from me. There is a soft spot in my heart for this apartment, which was the first and only residence in New York where I lived totally on my own. I spent quite a bit of money to fix it up and make it cute, only to move out after just a year. I love where I live now for a lot of reasons, but my little bachelor pad was great, in its own tiny, 6th-floor-walk-up kind of way.

Plants!

Ah yes, Edison bulbs and chalk board paint. Welcome to 2005.

The table was a flea market find.

The bathroom had slightly lavender tinted white tiles, and I found the perfect color match with a Ralph Lauren paint called Aspen Peak. A glamorous color name for such a teeny tenement bathroom. I then added the gloss black trim in all the corners, like a gift box.

Snake plants under the sink. You saw it here first. Actually I think I may have seen it in Dwell before I did it.

My grandmother's art hung in the bedroom.

Shield yours eyes... that is a Philippe Stark chair! Part of my senior thesis project hangs on the wall above the bed.

MODERN NEW ENGLAND BATHROOMS

We stayed at friends' house in Maine. It is a lovely home designed by German architect Klaus Mueller, and with much contribution from friends of the owners (architects, builders) including myself. My input is realized in the bathrooms. The owners wanted a house that felt New England without being traditional, so in the bathrooms we used earthier colors and textures but installed them with clean lines and modern hardware.

We picked out the materials together, and I am really pleased with the results. As always, there are things I wish the contractor had done differently, and things I wish I had done differently (those pretty sinks splash water everywhere and I will never specify them again!) but for the most part, I think they came out great.

Soaking in the Master Bath tub while looking out at the trees is special.

Here is the little Guest Bath on the 1st level. Under cabinet lighting like this is very flattering to the person looking in the mirror.