Andrea Pompiliocreative director of various fashion companies such as Onitsuka Tigera sophisticated Japanese sportswear brand, is a manifesto of itself, storied as he is with tattoos«each contains a certain memory, both happy and painful: I decided to visually imprint them on my skin so as not to forget how and what I built to become who I am now».
And, as in a literary operation of destructionan expression that indicates a ‘story within a story’ repeating a sequence ad infinitum, his Milanese home looks like him. Not far from the multicultural and lively area of Chinatown, it is located on the main floor (already intended for concluding business and drawing up contracts) of a building from the 1930s – “my favorite historical period” – with solid bourgeois origins.
«Here, as in a small city resort, those who came to buy enormous quantities of wheat, grown in this area which was then built up, were hosted. I have not deliberately changed anything about this house, nor the layout, nor the walls, decorations, floors and fixtures, which I preferred to restore. but do not replace. I limited myself to repainting the parquet black: it was not my intention to distort its proportions or insert an element that was dissonant with its history.”
Born in Pesaro, but already as a child eager to live in Milan, the city of fashion and opportunities, he is the son of an architect and a painter and grew up in a context where the whole family had been involved in clothing for generations, like his grandparents who were owners of several boutiques in the city, but who played an important role in his choice to become a stylist, and then to increase and enrich his cultural background until he became author of artistic installations, interior design, advertising campaigns and image consultancy.
All these factors could only lead to a multilateral, i.e. eclectic, approach. Eclecticism in interests as well as eclecticism on theoretical ground, which becomes a fruitful crossroads between aesthetics, perception, search for harmony that arises from the concept of ‘rediscovered classic’ to offer surprising solutions.
Pompilio underlines how the multiplicity of his culture draws on the many trips made especially for the collaborations spent with Prada, Saint Laurent and Calvin Klein, but what inspires him infurnish your space – where she lives with her partner and the two cats Bear and Orsola – the most relevant data is that of time, past and present.
«More than a house, I would define it as a container of memories: there is a part of my childhood in it collection of Walt Disney themed gadgets or in some Asian vases which I bought everywhere for markets and antique shopsbut put together they seem to be part of the same collection. There is also trace of sudden falling in love or lasting passions, such as material ones – I love brass, but only if oxidised, aged – or aesthetic ones, such as the clean and geometric lines that I find in Art Deco, but also in a certain design Italian of the fifties and seventies”.
Therefore, in the living room stands a hexagonal table by Romeo Regadesigner who worked with Gabriella Crespi e Willy Rizzo to found the Italian Modernist Glam of the Seventies, which coexists with an ancient Chinese carpet. The golden anodized aluminum bookcases from the 1950s, made by Feal (a Milanese company whose name was the acronym of Fonderie Elettriche Alluminio e Leghe) host art books and oil portraits of the young queer artist on the mahogany shelves Pascual Rodríguez.
In the living room, the famous daybed Cleopatra di Dick Cordemeijerdesigned in 1954 for Auping, dialogues with the two mid-twentieth century armchairs by the Danish duo Peter Hvidt and Orla Mølgaard-Nielsen and with the great self-portrait of the American figurative painter Paul Richard. In the kitchen, above the custom-made furniture, floats a vintage chandelier by an unknown designer, whose sinuous curves seduced the homeowners. In another room and bedroom, i furniture specially designed by architect Filippo Dini, who also helped Pompilio in the renovation of the apartmentthey are made of wood and wicker.
«But I’m not anti-modern: I have an ambivalent relationship with things, I love them very much because they are the concretion of a specific moment, but if I lose them for any reason, I let them go, like a dress that I designed and then, in production, I will have to abandon.”
There is an apparently entropic coherence that binds these rooms, but entropy is only an opportunity to keep the door wide open and let everything in, and then rearrange everything with method and rationality. Where you can reflect yourself with serenity.
Living © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Living newsletter: styles and trends for your home
Source: living.corriere.it
