{"id":5385,"date":"2025-09-06T06:08:22","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T06:08:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/5385\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T06:08:22","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T06:08:22","slug":"revisiting-giorgio-armanis-italian-farmhouse-by-the-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/5385\/","title":{"rendered":"Revisiting Giorgio Armani\u2019s Italian Farmhouse by the Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

Giorgio Armani, the revolutionary designer who made his indelible mark on both fashion and interior design throughout his 50-year career, has died at the age of 91, his eponymous company announced on September 4, 2025. The billionaire businessman<\/a>, who retained sole ownership of his company, was born on July 11, 1934, in Piacenza, Italy. Though it\u2019s hard to imagine now, Armani<\/a>\u2019s career had humble origins: he got his start in fashion as a window dresser at a department store. In 1975, he founded his luxury fashion house in Milan. The aesthete, who was known for his obsessive attention to detail, forever changed the silhouette of office fashion when he introduced his designs for unstructured yet sumptuous suits for both men and women, popularized in the 1980 film American Gigolo, which featured actor Richard Gere dressed in head-to-toe Armani. His clothing was featured in many iconic films and television shows that followed, including The Untouchables and Miami Vice. His designs quickly became a celebrity staple on the red carpet too.<\/p>\n

In 2000, Armani<\/a> launched his interior design brand, Armani\/Casa<\/a>. As with his clothing, Armani favored simple yet elegant designs that emphasized practicality and a human presence in his interiors. \u201cA home is a nest, where the most important thing is not the surroundings, but who lives there,\u201d the designer told Architectural Digest in a 1983 tour<\/a> of his home in Forte dei Marmi, Italy. \u201cI never want to feel like an object in my own home,\u201d he added, directly comparing his restrained design philosophy to that of his fashion sensibilities. \u201cInterior design is something like putting on a comfortable, unstructured jacket.\u201d<\/p>\n

Throughout the years, Armani opened the doors of his many self-designed spaces to AD, from a 17th-century home in Switzerland<\/a> laden with dark mahogany to a Far East\u2013inspired Saint-Tropez abode<\/a>. \u201cI have fun with my homes, which have been my greatest investments. I don\u2019t buy Picassos, I buy houses,\u201d he said in 2015. \u201cThis is a passion I\u2019ve had since I was young\u2014creating ambiences that make you want to stay.\u201d \u2014 Katie Schultz<\/a><\/p>\n

In 2004, Architectural Digest revisited Armani\u2019s Forte dei Marmi farmhouse, speaking with the designer about how the home had remained unchanged and about his design philosophy.<\/p>\n

Reread the article from the December 2004 issue below.<\/p>\n

Giorgio Armani, the designer whose creations are at the same time classic and revolutionary, represents a paradox in the world of fashion. The couturier, who eased the tailored fit of traditional clothes by inventing a relaxed, unstructured look paired with a comfortable feel, nonetheless remains a classicist, searching for an ideal of beauty by avoiding the unnecessary. Through a process of elimination, he reduces designs to elemental simplicity, producing trend-resistant pieces that never fall out of fashion.<\/p>\n

Though Armani is best known for his sartorial innovations, he has long experimented with interiors. His calming eye easily moves between fashion design and interior design, underscoring the close, sometimes intimate, relationship between the two disciplines. For Armani, interior design starts in the home\u2014specifically, his home, or homes, in Europe and America. His own interiors showcase forerunners of the furniture in his line Armani Casa, and the restraint of the forms that characterize pieces now on his showroom floors was evident in a house he designed in the early 1980s in Forte dei Marmi, a retreat on the Versilia coast in Tuscany (see Architectural Digest, May 1983). Some 20 years later the interior remains timeless. \u201cThe house in Forte was my first holiday home and, therefore, holds a special place in my heart,\u201d says the designer. \u201cI decided to decorate it with the idea of creating a cabin on the sea. I have not changed the house since then, and it has lived incredibly well over the years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Though<\/p>\n

Though Armani is best known for his sartorial innovations, he has long experimented with interiors.<\/p>\n

COPYRIGHT \u00a92003 THE COND\u00c9 NAST PUBLICATIONS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.<\/p>\n

Italy is blessed with traditional farmhouses that have acquired a second lease on life as vacation and weekend homes. But these charmingly casual houses, many of them centuries old, come with a rigid spatial order that is antithetical to modern lifestyles. Made of stone, the interior walls form boxy configurations that are difficult to adapt to the lives of people who want ease of movement. The farmhouse that Armani found in Forte dei Marmi, a long-established resort community convenient to Milan, had already been restored in 1940, but Armani completely reinvented the interior, opening it for flow.<\/p>\n

Just as he relaxes the structure of clothing, he relaxed the house’s structured interiors. The exterior was left largely as he found it, a beautifully proportioned, rustic two-story building comfortably settled on its grounds, but he brought down walls inside. Rooms lost their boundaries and merged into larger spaces that run through and up the house. The apparently simple farmhouse masks a far more complex\u2014and modernist\u2014interior world.<\/p>\n

Armani may be an inspired designer, but the inspirations are based on principle\u2014the principle of function: If his fashions are eminently wearable, his interiors are equally livable. He believes that a house should conform to its occupant and not the occupant to the house. \u201cIn essence, a house should not overwhelm the person living in it. The house must be lived.\u201d The surroundings are deferential, completed by a group of friends enjoying conversation encouraged by physical comfort and a visual calm. People are the center of attention, not vases on a low table.<\/p>\n

For many decorators, design often starts with a spectacular piece\u2014an Oriental carpet that grounds a room or a carved mantel with a trophy painting above it. \u201cI have not acquired any antiques or paintings,\u201d Armani says. \u201cI think that in this kind of house, antiques should be used sparingly. I wanted a place where you could walk barefoot in the summer and sit by a roaring fire in the winter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"More<\/p>\n

More than 20 years ago, Giorgio Armani thoroughly renovated the interiors but chose not to alter the rustic exterior.<\/p>\n

COPYRIGHT \u00a92003 THE COND\u00c9 NAST PUBLICATIONS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.<\/p>\n

Instead of arranging a hierarchy of pieces, from an imposing armoire or dining table to such accessories as lamps and accent pillows, he conceives of spaces as fields of furniture with an almost evenly dispersed emphasis. The furniture in a portion of the living room occupies an alcove but does not dictate the geometry of the living area. The calm of the rooms comes from the stability of the pieces. Armani chose furniture with big volumes whose weight alone grounds the spaces, each mass almost a complete environment in itself. He may have domesticated the architecture with plain wood and aluminum paneling, but he sized the furniture at an almost architectural scale, and the architecture and furniture marry as near equals.<\/p>\n

Armani affirmed the notion of a continuous field from the furniture to the architectural shell with a palette of colors and materials that minimized contrasts while maintaining a discreet differentiation. He upholstered the furniture in natural hues and in materials whose uniformity ties the rooms together and visually expands the spaces. The cocoa floor matting blends with the slightly darker fabric, which, in turn, complements the white paneling on the walls and ceilings. In deference to the walls, whose clean surfaces and soft tones suffuse the interiors with a gentle quiet, he avoided hanging pictures. He also virtually eliminated distracting light fixtures and other accessories. The few lamps he did use qualify as furniture: Two pairs of table lamps, brass cubes for the bases supporting pyramidal shades, echo the simple euclidean geometries of the furniture.<\/p>\n

This is a house in which the seamless agreement of the parts builds into a harmony of the whole. The magic lies in the atmosphere that Armani created by balancing the architecture and furniture in a well-tempered environment. Lit to glowing, the spaces ease occupants into a tranquil state of mind. \u201cI believe that fashion and design go hand in hand,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you dress in a certain way, you can’t live in a house with a contrasting atmosphere. Harmony is the key to serenity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Woven-coconut<\/p>\n

Woven-coconut floor matting offsets a 1930s table and chairs. Interior shutters original to the six-bedroom house remained after the redesign.<\/p>\n

COPYRIGHT \u00a92003 THE COND\u00c9 NAST PUBLICATIONS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.\"The<\/p>\n

The living room narrows at one end to an intimate fireside sitting area. White panels on the walls and ceiling lend the room a nautical air. The house, is \u201cideal for a simple, ultrarelaxing holiday shared with friends,\u201d says Armani. \u201cI don\u2019t pretend to create industrial design, but I do try to design objects in the cleanest, most clearly defined way,\u201d Armani once said.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A brass canopy bed and a leather club chair are in the serene second master bedroom. Armani designed the pyramidal shades on the 1920 brass-and-wood table lamps. \u201cLamps are necessary,\u201d he has noted.<\/p>\n

COPYRIGHT \u00a92003 THE COND\u00c9 NAST PUBLICATIONS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.\"\u201cThey\u2019re<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re among the few things that create an atmosphere.\u201d Forming an alcove in the master bedroom are a stair and a small landing that lead to an attic intended for office use. \u201cI chose warm colors\u2014from the khaki on the sofas to the gray of my bed\u2014that would blend with the wood and the matting,\u201d Armani once commented.<\/p>\n

COPYRIGHT \u00a92003 THE COND\u00c9 NAST PUBLICATIONS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.\"Maritime<\/p>\n

Maritime pines surround the keyhole-shaped swimming pool at the rear of the house. Wood decking mimics the house\u2019s interior paneling. \u201cThe pool is perhaps the only thing that is luxurious, but I was so excited to have a pool at the time that I went a little overboard,\u201d the designer says.<\/p>\n

COPYRIGHT \u00a92003 THE COND\u00c9 NAST PUBLICATIONS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.<\/p>\n

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest<\/a><\/p>\n

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