Explore a Dolomites retreat fit for a leading textile designer

True atmosphere is usually only achievable in a home through the long passage of time and people through its rooms. I don’t mean the atmosphere you find in a candlelit restaurant; I mean that ephemeral, quiet feeling you get in the library of an ancient country house on a Sunday afternoon. After all, there’s a reason they say time is the best decorator. There are those few, however, who can conjure that feeling through decoration. Doing so in a new build apartment is a nearly impossible task, and yet it’s something Idarica Gazzoni seems able to do time and again with the greatest ease.

Idarica, the Bologna born textile designer of Arjumand’s World, had a career as an immensely talented decorative painter before she turned her talents to textile design, and perhaps it is her painterly vision that allows her to create Proustian fantasies out of thin air in a matter of months. This time, it’s in the Dolomites, in Cortina d’Ampezzo.

The starting point for the house was a wonderful collection of good antique furniture inherited from a family home in South Tyrol. This sort of furniture is often made without nails, relying on the joinery skills of the craftsmen, and is painted in floral motifs or left in that blanched Alpine wood. Unlike anywhere else in Italy, Tyrolean culture and decorative arts are deeply influenced by the Austrian imperial tradition, blended with Italian influences. It was this idea of cultural cross pollination that led Idarica’s mind to the Silk Road and to the fabrics and ceramics that made their way from East to West, which have inspired much of her work.

These Asian decorative arts found their way to South Tyrol, too. They were first carried overland through Central Asia and the Middle East to Levantine ports like Alexandria, then shipped to Venice, and finally transported northward via mountain passes like the Brenner, linking East and West through the heart of Europe.

Idarica explains to me that this was the feeling she wanted to capture in this small space - the meeting of craftspeople who, without exchanging words, inspired each other across vast distances. “Knowing I would use the furniture, I started next with the idea of using Asian inspired fabrics,” Idarica tells me. “I created a cocoon in the small space, and then I could start layering.” All of the fabrics in the house, which line almost every square inch of the walls, are made in silk velvet.

Idarica Gazzoni's home in the Dolomites © Guido Taroni, Cabana Issue 24

The fabric in the sitting room is inspired by a 17th-century Chinese silk, with curtains to match and large, comfortable armchairs upholstered in pale brown and pink suzani. The fabric was chosen because it has a hint of green in its brown undertones. Idarica describes it as the same “broken green” as the mountain grass outside.

A large gold mirror sits above a sideboard in this room, flanked by a pair of Tyrolean portraits: a man and a woman in traditional dress, jovially facing one another against the backdrop of snow capped mountains.

The bedrooms, too, weave together influences from textile traditions around the world. Idarica studies archives and books of textiles, selecting elements, changing them, and combining them. For a fabric in one of the bedrooms, Idarica overlaid a Chinese red ground with a trellis pattern found in a Persian antique textile. In the kitchen, a beautiful but damaged silk sari was repurposed to make shimmering little curtains over open shelving.

Mirror and glass are used expertly throughout the house. In many spaces, instead of dividing walls, Idarica used glass paneled dividers, their woodwork painted in oxblood red. In the kitchen, the space is opened up with mirrors above the shelving, making the room feel much larger. A full service of hand-painted plates from Ceramica di Lodi—a wedding gift but never used —encircles the kitchen to excellent effect, reflected by the mirroring.

Above the fireplace in the sitting room, the space appears reflected in a large concave sculpture by the young artist Pietro Pasolini, capturing the entire room in a distorted form. I’ve always enjoyed such reflections, not because they offer a faithful rendering of what’s in front of us but because they allow us to reimagine it.

The same goes for historic interiors. One doesn’t have to look back on things precisely as they happened and recreate things exactly as they would have looked; it’s possible to create a more perfect version of the past, orchestrating a meeting of objects from the vantage point of the present, as Idarica has done here.