More than a place to live in, this is a workshop of visionary creativity. Tiziana Serretta who began her professional life as a judicial university researcher and professor, abandoned academia and devoted herself to the arts and has given life to an unexpected house in Milan. From collector to dealer, she opened an art gallery specifically devoted to everything ancient, and in more detail, to sculptured jewelry in her home town in 1990 in Palermo, Sicily. Now as Diana Vreeland Ltd, a name that has been of great inspiration for Mrs. Serretta, her activity is based in London and participates in major Art international exhibitions.
Mrs. Serretta has to her credit, various publications and co-operations with worldwide museums and the rediscovery of crucial figures such as Sterlè, Marchak and Andrew Grima as well as her vintage haute couture collection from names such as Vionnet, Dior, Sciapparelli, YSL, Cardin, Rabanne, Valentino, Capucci, Courrèges, Pucci, Givenchy and Balmain. Her new escapade ArTS is in the groove of interior design and the research of unexplored concepts and new extraordinary materials.
ArTS’ first achievement is this Milanese home comprising artists and craftsmen, such as Eugenio Catemario di Quadri, Massimo Giudici, Ruggero Projetti, Antonio Falsaperla, Claudio Foglia, Gianni Mattiacci and Ennio Cacciamani. As Serretta herself says, her concept of the home is based on the principle of mobility and weightlessness, a structure that is easily moved with very low masonry costs where the designed volume can be easily dismantled and shipped away.
This 230 square metre apartment has been transformed into a dreamy, oneiric, ancestral, mysterious organic grotto of the future, swinging from monolithic walls, from free circulation of energetic continuous movement, where the log cabin edged restrooms are the only closed space of the apartment, alongside the circular strange baptistery corian bathtubs. The furniture and the custom made walls are realized in a mixture of chalk covered in resin, cement powder, chromatic pigments and non-hazardous plastics. The kitchen is made out of practical steel and fully equipped, state of the art. The ceiling has been brought back to the original cement, obliterating every single added layer. The pavement that integrates the full spacial expansion is made of pale resin mixed personally by Mrs. Serretta to volcanic sand, gold dust and mother of pearl powder. The Majestic seventies bronzed steel fireplace rules over the living area deciphered by a modular round shaped couch coated with fur under-illuminated platform. The libraries’ surfaces have been even more molded with Japanese paper to enhance the fluctuating levity. The few art pieces include a bust covered with sea-shells, white corals and minerals, mannerist inspiration from the beginning of the seventies, from Gucci`s boutique in Florence, Paolo Spall’s 1960s bronze sculpture ”Acrobats”, the fourth century andiron and a jade incense burner from the Ming dynasty. The main bedroom faces a green park through a wide full height window.
Tiziana Serretta therefore reveals a prismatic metamorphic but all the while secret and allegoric personalità. This house fully resembles her, like a cave-spacecraft. Tiziana is the demiurge of a new renaissance workshop, L’Homo Sapiens of the third millennium inventing a technological, and extremely abstract shelter, a lair projected towards the future.
text by Cesare Cunaccia
