Interior designer and creative director Paola Moretti was entrusted with this refurbishment, interior designing and art advising project at Brescia. Elisabetta Morandini, an art collector, and her husband had just purchased the piano nobile (main floor) of the Palazzo Martinengo della Motella in the city center and wanted to transform it into a home where art and design would play an important role, but without losing its historical character. “It wasn’t at all easy to come up with this project,” says Paola as she shows me some photographs of what the place once looked like.
The conversion process happened in three stages: restoration, refurbishment and interior design. “I completely redesigned the bathrooms and the kitchen,” she says. With a minimalist approach: the walls are pale grey, all the basins and the marble bathtub, were custom-designed by Paola.
The Morandini family trusted her aesthetic choices completely, which made successful her task of balancing the old and the new in the different spaces. The entrance hall is striking: a Boa sofa by the Campana Brothers for Edra, on the wall is a mirror by Anish Kapoor, then into a dining room furnished with a vintage table by Hans Wegner, and a Mamacloud light by Frank Gehry.
Despite the complexity of the work, the process took only six months, but it required total dedication. “I do not do more than 2, 3 homes a year, but they need to have a never-before-seen ‘wow’ factor,” she discloses. “And for each of them, I start with research of ‘Genius Loci’, which means understanding the soul of the place. It’s only after this study that my ideas emerge,” she explains.
