Inside Dolce and Gabbana’s Portofino Villa

Photographed by François Halard, these pictures originally appeared in “La Dolce & Gabbana Vita,” by Hamish Bowles, in the November 2005 issue of Vogue.

“Like Alice tumbling into the surreal Wonderland at the bottom of the rabbit hole, the unsuspecting visitor steps out of the diamond-lit, lavender-scented balm of a lazy Italian afternoon and into—well, what exactly?” So asked Hamish Bowles, then Vogue’s European Editor-at-Large, upon his visit to Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana’s Portofino villa—or in this case, villas. The answer, Bowles concurred, lay somewhere between a ’70s disco and the set of an ’80s Dallas-esque soap opera. The property, whose rooms appear again here in honor of today’s Dolce & Gabbana Spring 2017 show, is unsurprisingly a maximalist overload. But its high volume of lush blooms, gilded elements, and Italian designs almost seem to foreshadow the company’s aesthetic in recent years.

Dolce and Gabbana had no intention of acquiring a home in Portofino. When this estate came up for sale, they had recently completed work on a house near Monte Carlo and weren’t in the market. But the previous owner insisted the designers were the only two people who should live in the house after her. And, upon seeing the multiple dwellings on the stretch of land, the two men were sold.

It is somewhat of a shock to read that David Chipperfield, the famed British architect known for his minimalism, was tasked with the renovation of these structures (which were, in Gabbana’s words, “wild, abbandonata.”) However, his work provided the perfect canvas to showcase tiled walls, alongside loads and loads of sumptuous décor. And while both fashion designers are clearly aesthetes, “[Dolce] has an obsession,” Gabbana said at the time. “He loves to redo the house every six months—like the collections!” Their yin and yang dynamic, though, is certainly not a problem. As Gabbana put it, “We look at the same things with two different points of view—but we arrive at the same place. [Dolce] loves the white [Lucio] Fontana and I love the red Fontana,” referring to works by the Italian Arte Povera artist. “But it’s still Fontana!”

Original article and pictures take http://www.vogue.com/13482696/dolce-and-gabbana-portofino-home-from-the-archives/?mbid=social_onsite_pinterest site