Villa Carlotta, Lake Como

A setting for art collecting for more than three hundred years, Villa Carlotta was built on the shores of Lake Como in the seventeenth century. Today, in this place, sculptures created by Canova and Thorvaldsen dreamily ponder the soft colours and physicality of velvets and veils, wools and linens, jacquards and iridescent fabrics. A collection that explores a new equilibrium between architecture and nature inhabits an environment where building proportions are in constant dialogue with the beauty of flowers and plants. Colours, textures and weaves emerge between arches and columns, a few steps from a true icon of Italian lifestyle: a Mediterranean botanic garden. In this haven that was so dear to Stendhal and Flaubert, the whispers of cedars and sequoias, centuries-old rhododendrons and ferns join those of succulent plants, aromatic herbs and the fruit hidden in the citrus tunnel. Lake Como attracts visitors from all over the world in the summer months: now it rests. It lays bare its austere and elegant wintry soul. It embraces the soft and generous comfort of textile materials. Each fabric has its own secret way of communicating with a particular detail in the Villa. The materials, the deliberate irregularity, and the drops of these fabrics complement the features of windows and mouldings, the movement of the terrazzo flooring, and the geometric lines of the Italian garden’s tall hedges, as the drapery confers about colour with the precious friezes of the vaults. Over the centuries, the building has seen the stories, choices and tastes of many illustrious families accrue layer by layer. The multitude of languages (also including the garden and its successive designs), and todays current incarnation of Villa Carlotta as a museum, point out the way beautiful things perdure and are transformed at the same time. They evolve yet aren’t ephemeral. Straddling past and present, Dedar’s new creations nonchalantly address these grand spaces and their combination of styles, to create a new language that adapts with instinctive harmony to the environment. | Photo credit: Andrea Ferrari