Fortuny. Just the name conjures timeless design, elegance and refinement. Today’s post is inspirational eye candy, connecting the dots from one generation to the next. Meet two creative geniuses, Mariano Fortuny and Timothy Corrigan. Whether creating textiles, furniture, lighting, carpets or working in one of the many other fields for which they were/are both so well known, these two men have added so much beauty to our world. Both of them then..and now.. will be remembered forever.
Mariano Fortuny { 1871-1949 }
Below is a room at Mariano Fortuny’s working laboratory, the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, Italy, which was, upon his death, donated to the city of Venice by his widow, Henrietta, and became the Fortuny Museum. Recently, a group of friends took a tour of this Museum, on #BlogTourMilan, produced by MODENUS. Boston designer, friend and artist, Pamela Copeman, went on this tour and if you’d like, read more about what she felt and saw when she was fortunate enough to have had this opportunity to visit the Fortuny Museum, by coming back after you’ve finished reading this post, and clicking here .
The Fortuny factory’s techniques for hand printing his exquisite, watery textiles is still known only to a few people. Production has never stopped. They are still hand printed in Italy. {Another designer often featured on this blog, Barry Darr Dixon, helped Fortuny remodel their only showroom in Venice. }
Timothy Corrigan
Yesterday, I went to the Decorative Center of Houston’s Spring Market event. While there, I interviewed on video the other subject of today’s post, Architectural Digest Top 100 Interior Designer, Timothy Corrigan, about the details that he believes bring a gracious home to life. Please watch for that post with those videos, next week. In the meantime, it is his lovingly restored home in the Loire Valley of France, the Chateau du Grand-Luce, shown below, which will, I believe, one day become another museum. It is breathtaking.
Here is one small corner of the many comfortably elegant and exquisitely layered and refined interiors Timothy has designed. Is the small ottoman in front of the fireplace upholstered in a Fortuny textile ? It appears that it might be.
Here is another room he designed, that I personally love. No matter how grand the architecture, Timothy always manages to imbue the room with a warm, gracious ambience that invites you to sit right down and have a conversation or read a good book. { He shared with me that books are his primary indulgence. See the over the top beautiful private libraries he’s designed for his clients on his website, here.} This ability to achieve *comfortable elegance*, in even the grandest of environments, has become Timothy’s trademark.
His own new textile collection for Schumacher will also be featured on our next post and it is stunning in person. One of my favorites from it is this pattern, below, and I could see this colorway being used on the chair in the picture above. Could you?
In the picture below, a sofa has banded on the top edge surface with Fortuny fabric, is defined all the way around with silver nailheads, to cover the seam between the Belgian linen and the Fortuny. An exquisite decorative detail.
Have you enjoyed this post today showing you how , from one generation to the next, timeless design, and the geniuses behind it, have created {and are creating} the beautiful textiles, furniture and objects our own children and grandchildren will collect tomorrow? If you have, please let us know in the comments. We always appreciate hearing from you!
Leslie Carothers
for
Leslie Hendrix Wood
Decorator
Chancellor Interiors
Midland, Texas
Founder, Editor In Chief of Hadley Court
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Gracious Living. Timeless Design. Family Traditions.
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Image Credits: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8-10, 11, 12
