Vincent Van Duysen, the visionary creative director of Italian design powerhouse Molteni&C, opens the door to his personal spaces.
Already a subscriber?The Milan Furniture Fair is an object lesson in controlled pandemonium. In April each year, the international design flock descends on the Lombardian capital, eager to feast on the latest releases from Italian and global manufacturers. Almost 380,000 people hit town – increasing the city’s population by some 25 per cent. There’s a tight schedule of launches, a chock-a-block roster of events, and a seemingly endless flow of prosecco to keep things merry.
“As a student in the 1980s, I understood how significant Molteni is to Italian design history. It was No. 1 in terms of modernity,” he says. “Everything was so exquisitely crafted and was being designed by some of the greatest architects of the time, like Luca Meda, Aldo Rossi and Jean Nouvel.” Architects, he points out, are able to “think beyond the object” and “conceive of entire environments according to user needs, not just aesthetics”.
Giulia Molteni and her brother, Giovanni, and sister Anna grew up in a sprawling and airy modernist villa in Brianza, commissioned by her father Carlo of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, in the mid-1980s. “It was such a beautiful place to spend our childhood, not very common,” she recalls, noting that the house is still the family seat and that the company – spread over four production sites for a total of 200,000 square metres – remains nearby.
For this year’s Molteni furniture collection, Van Duysen tapped the grand Milanese estetica borghese – bourgeois aesthetic – as incarnated by Piero Portaluppi. . Van Duysen was born in Lokeren, midway between Antwerp and Ghent, in 1962. After graduating from the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, he was recruited to the Milan studio of Aldo Cibic who had co-founded with Ettore Sottsass the iconoclastic post-modernin 1980. Van Duysen, however, was not swayed by the flamboyantly superficial, pop-culture focus of Memphis. “Even as a kid, I went against anything that was categorised as a trend,” he recalls. “I still don’t believe in trends in that way.
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