Italian Designer Filippo Carandini invited Karen McCartney for an espresso in his playful, colour-saturated Milanese apartment filled with his own designs, art and family heirlooms.
Artist and designer Filippo Carandini’s work is a tour de force of naïve expressionism on the one hand and exactitude on the other, as colourful, splashy painted surfaces coated in high gloss lacquer pair with precision metals and marbles. His work is constantly evolving, with the launch of a new collection, including Murano glass lamps and chandeliers at Nilufar Depot for Milan Design Week. Here Karen McCartney visits his Milanese apartment to experience his interior world first-hand.
Florence-born artist and designer Filippo Carandini made the bold move to Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design in London at the age of 19, with little English and even less awareness of what the course would hold for him. “I had come from an academic art training in Florence, but in London, it was very much about breaking down, tearing apart existing assumptions and with little direction or points of reference. The idea was to allow us to build our own ideas – to be honest, it was very confusing at first,” Carandini says.
As we sit in his Milan apartment, with its vibrant coloured walls and pieces of his own work alongside collected design and 17th-century family heirlooms, he acknowledges that this process has enabled him to produce the work he does today. He sees in his current designs a level of freedom in his impactful, hand- painted panels, tables, and sideboards, which are the direct result of shedding the weight of art historical reference. Notably, he is a skilled realist painter, as his detailed works of piles of clothes created during the Covid lockdown illustrate, but it is the power of his colour-field work with its broad intuitive brushstrokes that has captured the attention of the design community through his representation by Nilufar Gallery.
Carandini is the first to admit he has not trained as a product designer but came to design through a mixture of talents and skills, friendships and opportunities. With a wide range of work from art direction and graphic design to three-dimensional rendering, concept development and interiors, his design process emerged from a desire to introduce new unseen products into high-end render projects. “I started to sketch these ideas, furniture pieces which we used in the renders and then I connected with old colleagues who could help with the realisation of the design and prototyping,” Carandini says.
But it is now the mark of the hand and the imperfect nature of how paint colours layer, interact, and enliven form that fascinates him. For example, his dining table, Noctua, from the New Pompeii collection, was on show within the highly d context of Nilufar Depot. While it has a strong pedestal form, the painterly pointillist surface gives the table ical presence, derived from art experiments in dense, close tonalities in acrylic colours placed around his home.
Filippo Carandini’s living room combines all the key elements of his bold interior style: immersive colour washed over the walls and ceiling broken by a traditional dado. In his signature mesmeric colours, the arched panel is propped against the wall framing a Nova chair for Eponimo, also by Carandini; its solidity balances the elongated and open metal shelving of his design.
The kitchen colour was inspired by a drying bed sheet, while the Kundalini Shakti 200 light by Marzio Rusconi Clerici for Kundalini adds a sculptural note.
His home, in a Milanese apartment block, had been renovated by its previous architect owner, opening it up to a better flow and creating a generous sense of entrance.
In his fifth-floor apartment, bought from a young architect who had re-modelled the space by opening it up but retaining the character, he was able to introduce colour as the backdrop to his work and life. Some colours happened by accident as he contemplated the effectiveness of a peach-toned sheet drying on a clothes rack; others were intentional and immediately effective such as the caramel wrap around the top of the bedroom wall and ceiling. His panels are a moveable decorative feast as circles, rectangles and arches (a nod to his Florentine past) enliven walls propped on the sofa, hanging over the bed, anchored on the floor. One magnificent arch in tones of red and orange is headed for a Greek boutique hotel, and others are headed for an exhibition later in the year.
“I like to work and live with natural light, and the apartment gets great light from the east in the morning in the kitchen. It swings around to the living room for late afternoon sunsets,” he says.
Light has also become a part of his design output with a new table light, chandelier and wall light in a collection, Keria, launched through Nilufar Gallery. Candy cane pieces of Murano glass in amethyst tones hook in layers onto a frame – each piece individual and artisanal – to create a skirt-like motif, giving an expressive femininity to the lights.
Filippo’s home is very much the personification of his work and his personal history. The colour brings joy, and the pieces from the family bring heart. The space and his work are a lesson in confidence and trusting your instinct. “I like it when I let go and have an affinity with the canvas – those are always the best works,” he says.
An early Gòrgone bookcase with hand-painted doors and metal shelving is used to showcase a mix of collected objects.
Carandini’s clever adjustable mirror can hang on a wall or sit on a surface. The yellow lacquered wooden structure and rotating panels reflect light around the caramel-tinted bedroom.
Another view of the small bedroom shows the effectiveness of bands of paintwork combined with Carandini’s own works to enliven the space. He also incorporates a sense of his personal family history through framed works, furniture and objects.
The coloured and lacquered approach to his larger works is equally effective as a small gift box.
