Quintessence of bohemian chic, Gabriella Crespi’s worldly rattan is given a second youth
PortraitIn the 1960s and 1970s, the Italian designer and decorator imagined interiors for prestigious clients and stamped her signature with luxurious bamboo furniture. The designer, who would have turned 100 this year, is on display this spring in Milan and Turin, while Danish publisher Gubi is reissuing some of her iconic pieces.
When the vintage trend swept through interiors around ten years ago, Jacob Gubi went in search of designers unknown to the public but who had a good rating among design enthusiasts. This is how he unearthed creations by Mathieu Matégot, Jacques Adnet, Marcel Gascoin or Greta M. Grossman, to reissue them and insert them into the catalog of the Gubi house.
“Jacob’s idea was to make widely available these pieces that were originally produced in small series…”, explains Marie Kristine Schmidt, spokesperson for the publisher. “We understood that people wanted less rigid furniture, a bohemian spirit that would bring the idea of nature and garden life into the interiors, and that’s how we came up with the idea of re-editing Gabriella Crespi’s rattan furniture”, she continues. A philosophy that the Italian designer made her own when designing, in 1972, this collection made up of a three-seater sofa, an armchair, an ottoman and a table lamp, all made from curved and stacked rattan vines.
“With rattan and bamboo, my mother realized an intuition she had always carried with her: to create bridges between indoors and outdoors, with collections that would find their place in living rooms as well as on terraces or in gardens. For her, the porosity between these spaces was total,” remembers Elisabetta Crespi, who today manages the archives and the memory of the Milanese designer who died in 2017.
A vastly underestimated job
If Gabriella Crespi’s pieces, which represent the quintessence of bohemian chic style, are snapping up at auction, it’s because the glamorous Italian icon of the seventies has been the subject of a few publications for twenty years and is cited by creators as a source of inspiration. And this even if the richness, depth and quality of his work continue to be largely underestimated.
Born a hundred years ago into a bourgeois family, Gabriella Crespi studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan before entering the Politecnico, the great Lombard design school. Her career as a designer and decorator exploded in the 1960s and 1970s, when she began to design objects for Dior and to imagine, for clients as prestigious as the princely family of Monaco, Italian aristocrats or King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, interiors associated with luxury and relaxation, 18th century furnitureand century and Plexiglas objects.
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