Interior Designer Fabrizio Casiraghi Creates the Most Charming Spaces in Paris
The Milan-born, Paris-based interior designer has quickly become the darling of the European design set. He approaches his work as an eclectic mix of past and present, high and low, all the while getting to the heart of his clients' desires.
Since opening his studio six years ago, Milanese interior designer Fabrizio Casiraghi, 35, has built a portfolio rife with high-profile projects throughout Paris, Cannes, London, and the US. Casiraghi has brought prestige into each of his designs while maintaining a core sense of balance, making us prefer Verbier to Courchevel, and Ramatuelle to Saint-Tropez.
Like Achille Castiglioni and Renzo Piano before him, Casiraghi studied urbanism and architecture at the Politecnico in Milan. Shortly after graduating, he moved to Paris to work for Dominique Perrault, who designed the National Library of France. Casiraghi then returned to Italy and joined a group of volunteers at the Fondo Ambiente Italiano, a private foundation that, since 1975, has been concerned with the protection of some 60 Italian monuments and national parks, such as Milan’s Villa Necchi Campiglio, built between 1932 and 1935 by Piero Portaluppi. The villa’s rationalist architecture, lush gardens, and Art Deco decor inspired the young Casiraghi to pursue interior design, and he spent the next two years at Dimore Studio, where he was sent on various projects around the globe.
After returning to Paris in 2015 at age 29, Casiraghi opened his own agency, first designing private homes and then branching into retail and restaurant spaces. His work is notably influenced by the time he spent with his grandmother in the town of Brixen in the Austrian-inflected Trentino-Alto Adige region of Italy, as well as by French artists from the ’30s and ’40s such as Jean-Michel Frank, André Arbus, Jean Royère, and Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann.
The task of renovating the famed Parisian restaurant Drouant was at once an honor and a challenge for Casiraghi. Updated by Ruhlmann in the 1920s from its original 1880s design, the restaurant had undergone a notorious renovation in the 1980s. It needed to return to its Art Deco spirit while avoiding becoming a “period room.” “I immensely respect the work of architects like Jacques Garcia in France and the Studio Peregalli in Italy, who have, in their own organic manner, been able to recompose the past. But I prefer reinterpreting historical codes with the influence of the present,” says Casiraghi, who asked his friend Roberto Ruspoli to design the frescoes in two of the rooms of the famous Goncourt address. The same approach applied to his work on La Ponche, St. Tropez’ golden celebrity hideout of the ’60s and ’70s, as well as The Luigi, a piano bar where all of Cannes goes to recall a sense of vintage glamour.
A fan of Arts & Crafts, Casiraghi is often inspired to test “exotique” combinations. For him, the Shaker style pairs beautifully with the purity of a Noguchi lamp, or the Swedish Grace with a Free Edge armchair designed by George Nakashima. If staying away from pastiche is a fundamental design principle, so is adapting to the context and to the client. For example, a big apartment in the Invalides neighborhood of Paris, designed for a family, where the most overpowering elements were the building’s decorative effects: the chimneys, gildings, and Versailles hardwood floors. “We had to stay humble, go in little by little, adding small touches and strong colors.”
In Casiraghi’s own home in Paris, the Mitteleuropa of the last century is on eclectic display: a Josef Hoffmann fruit bowl, a lamp by Gabriella Crespi, the harsh curves of a Mario Botta and the eloquence of a Gio Ponti, and perhaps a thrifted bauble from the Marrakech souks where Casiraghi spends the holidays with his family. Future projects include the Bellevue Hotel in London, and private homes in LA and Miami.
Attuned to the moods of his clients, Casiraghi is equally comfortable transforming an Eiffel-style Parisian loft full of light and creating a “Garconnière feutrée” with tall, green-felted English panels, in the spirit of a private club. “A project is born out of constraints. My moodboard is composed by the location, of course, but also by the images that the client already has in mind,” he says. “My role is to listen, to adapt myself, and to not impose my signature. If I have a recognizable style now at 35 years old, what am I going to be able to accomplish when I am 50?”
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