Palazzo Fendi’s Private Apartment: Dimorestudio Layers a Roman Interior
Palazzo Fendi’s private apartment occupies a particular position within the fashion house’s Roman address. On the second floor of the palazzo at Largo Carlo Goldoni, it provides rooms for receiving guests, dining and private fittings. Dimorestudio treats this programme as an opportunity to build a complete interior world around the rituals of hospitality. The seventeenth-century building supplies its architectural scale; the studio’s contribution is expressed through the furniture, colour, art and smaller elements that bring that scale within reach. [1] [2]
The commission grew out of Fendi’s collaboration with Dimorestudio at Design Miami in 2014. The studio’s Roman Apartment installation explored a group of objects that could suggest an inhabited setting within an exhibition. Pieces from that conversation subsequently entered Palazzo Privé, unveiled in March 2016. Moving from a temporary presentation to an actual sequence of rooms changed their role: furniture and lighting could now engage with a historic envelope and the practical requirements of receiving people. [3]
Keeping the architecture in the conversation
The studio’s project description sets out a foyer, formal dining room, lounge and fitting room. Tall windows, high ceilings and elaborate stucco remain part of the composition. This existing framework gives the new work a series of fixed points: the height of an opening, the depth of a moulding, the rhythm of adjoining rooms. Read as a whole, the project demonstrates how furnishing can establish its own identity within an interior that already has a strong architectural voice. [2]
Wallpaper documents ceilings rising to approximately 4.2 metres and a palette of sage and blue-grey. Brass appears across practical fittings, including covers for radiators and air-conditioning equipment. These smaller interventions matter because they bring the necessities of a contemporary interior into the same material vocabulary as the decorative pieces. The scale of the palazzo is therefore addressed at two levels: through large objects that hold a room and through details encountered at arm’s length. [1]
Objects that organise the rooms
In the dining area, the Grand Square table combines a metal structure with a glass top. Above it, Lampada 036 brings together three parchment-and-brass lanterns. A bookcase of lacquered metal and coloured glass forms a boundary towards the living area. Yatzer’s interview with the designers places these commissioned pieces alongside vintage finds, including Marco Zanuso armchairs from 1951. Seen together, these objects suggest a conversation between different periods, origins and degrees of visual weight. [3]
The fitting room introduces a concentrated combination of pale green paint and dark blue silk. Elsewhere, artworks supplied through Mazzoleni include pieces by Lucio Fontana, Agostino Bonalumi, Nunzio and Josef Albers, according to the studio. The presence of these works adds a further layer to the relationship between surfaces and volumes. Fashion’s concern with material and colour is present in the room itself, extending beyond the garments that may be shown there. [2]
An apartment understood through its encounters
Our reading of Palazzo Privé centres on the way the designers distribute attention. Historic plasterwork establishes a continuous background, while a luminous screen, a suspended lantern or a sharply coloured textile introduces a closer point of focus. The visitor is given several scales at which to understand the interior. This seems especially appropriate for a place where a conversation, a fitting and a dinner require different distances between people and objects.
The project’s editorial interest lies in that relationship between collection and use. Each item has a distinct outline and material presence, yet the rooms are organised around recognisable activities. As a design study, Palazzo Privé shows how a brand can express a cultural identity through the arrangement of space: selecting, commissioning and placing objects becomes an architectural exercise in its own right.
Project details
Location: Palazzo Fendi, Largo Carlo Goldoni, Rome, Italy
Public unveiling: March 2016; Yatzer specifies 11 March 2016
Programme: Private reception, dining, lounge and fitting rooms for Fendi guests
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