All About Interior Designer Giuseppe Porcelli’s Debut Furniture Collection

MILAN — The air is thick with nostalgia as Billie Holiday’s tunes fill Giuseppe Porcelli’s Milan studio on Via Ampolla. The lighting is low and there’s a mix of old and new. An antique table, silver trays and swathes of eclectic printed fabrics adorn his office presided by a turn-of-the-century Riccardo Virgilio painting. Inspired by the bygone archetype of a bachelor pad or garçonnière, Porcelli crafts his own idea of a male hideaway reinterpreted through a queer lens.

At Design Week which kicked off here Monday, Porcelli unfurled Garçonnière, his first furniture and lighting collection.

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“The pieces play around with the elements that conventionally belong to different worlds. Elements usually thought of as feminine and masculine interchange. So a pink fringe or a gathered silk lampshade, both elements you would identify as ‘prissy,’ ‘unmanly,’ are mixed up with sharp and dry volumes, with black, gray and tortoiseshell plexiglass,” he told WWD. Porcelli’s version of the garçonnière is a place of contrasts; references from the ’30s and ’40s are blended with ’70s inspirations, past and new.

Before branching out on his own, Porcelli made a name for himself via high-profile projects through his work with Dimorestudio duo Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci. Among his many projects, he was the lead architect on their first interiors project in Florence in 2019 that involved transforming a neglected ’60s-era house into an Italian Modernist shrine of design.

The collection includes an armchair, made with gold-plated metal, natural bamboo and cotton bourette; a console table made with glossy lacquered wood and uncoated brushed solid brass; a table lamp with faux tortoiseshell plexiglass and polished brass; a silk lampshade and a mirror made with polished steel, uncoated brushed solid brass and bamboo roots, with a diamond bevel, silk rope and tassels.

For the event, Porcelli created an installation turning a military tent into a single-room apartment, bringing bygone icons into the mix from Piero Portaluppi, Gio Ponti, Carlo Scarpa, Gabriella Crespi and artists like Nanda Vigo, Edgar Degas and Josef Albers among them.

A pair of chairs from the Garçonnière collection by Giuseppe Porcelli — Garçonnière by Giuseppe Porcelli.

“I am fascinated by the contrasts, I love making work together things that you wouldn’t combine, and my style is quite layered and definitely not minimal. So there’s always room to experiment juxtapositions especially when it comes to the materials. I couldn’t do anything different for my first collection of furniture,” he said.