Inside Luca Guadagnino’s Latest Project: A Sustainable Luxury Store
If Call Me By Your Name ever gets a sequel—and its director, Luca Guadagnino, has certainly dropped enough hints to suggest it will—the rest of us are just going to have to wait a considerable bit. Guadagnino hasn’t just been filming projects like Suspiria and an upcoming HBO mini-series; he’s also been making moves into quite a different realm: that of design.
In June, Guadagnino struck out by collaborating with Fendi on a botanical print that turned up everywhere from sheer blouses to bucket hats on the house’s spring 2020 men’s runway. But Guadagnino has always dreamed of being an interior designer, and his latest design foray much more up his alley: He teamed up with the sustainable luxury label Redemption on designing its first flagship boutique Soho, which opens later this month.
First things first: The 4,000 square foot space has nothing to do with any of Guadagnino’s film sets. “When you conceive a physical space that has to be lived by real people in real life, you have to take in account the full experience of the senses,” he said via email, during a brief break from filming for HBO. “When you work on a movie set, you have to create a [two]-dimensional image.”
Oddly enough, it was a series of two-dimensional images ended up serving as Guadagnino’s starting point. In the early ’70s, the Rolling Stones took a trip to the Côte d’Azur, where they stayed in a villa and recorded an album—though the photos that document their trip suggest they also spent a good chunk of time lounging on the French Riviera-style space’s chevron wooden floors and divans. Guadagnino couldn’t blame them: He took such a liking to the space that he adapted several of its elements into an American boutique. (One with floors made of antique wood from Trentino, which Irish artisans reclaimed and carefully placed.)
The entryway luxuriously takes up a full third of the store, but there’s also a lounge room with divans and fully stocked bookshelves. Importantly, there’s also a skylight: Guadagnino said he and the light designer Massimiliano Baldieri put lighting high on their list of priorities. That was particularly true when it came to fitting rooms, which Guadagnino knows aren’t always ideal; after all, he’s something of a seasoned shopper himself. “Unfortunately I must admit that I am part of the consumption dependency,” he said. “So the short answer is yes: I love shopping.”
Related: Call Me By Your Name Is Getting a Sequel (of Some Sort)