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© Elisabetta Riccio, © Secret Home

THE SECRET HOME

Giorgia Mirabella

Words by Gin Harris

Giorgia is a whirlwind of geniality, energy and art – all gushing forth from her every pore.
To give you a rundown of her artistic training, we will need a good few lines of this magazine to put them all down on paper.…

School-leaving diploma from an art secondary school.
She studied classical ballet and contemporary dance for years (she is also qualified to teach this particular discipline).
She cultivated her passion for drawing on a painting course at the Accademia Albertina in Turin.
She undertook a sequence of internships at the Berlin Cameron communications agency in New York.
She graduated in Interior Design.
She specialised in New Entertainment Design and Food Experience Design at the Politecnico in Milan.

The drafting table and the sewing machine are the two technical instruments that have accompanied Giorgia since her earliest years since they were being used by her father who was working as a technical and mechanical designer and inventor of a variety of machinery. Her mother was also using the same technical instruments as Giorgia’s father in that she worked as a talented graphic artist and a clothes designer. Both parents were fine examples of creative minds working to the highest levels of extreme precision.

“I began drawing and dancing anywhere,” when I was three years old, Giorgia says. “My artistic development  has been solely instinctive. Such a natural inclination towards ART in the broadest and most varied sense of the word – DANCE, THEATRE, ARTISTIC AND TECHNICAL DRAWING –  has provided me with a key with which I can express myself and with which I am able to illustrate all of the artistic experiences that I have enjoyed over the years, both as an individual as well as a professional person. My utmost degree of expression revolves around a continual quest for HARMONY and EQUILIBRIUM surrounded by BEAUTY.”

WHY INTERIOR DESIGN?

We have asked Giorgia why she has actually decided to undertake a career as an lnterior Designer, rather than focusing upon one of her other myriad passions. She responded that Interior Design has been a sort of an encounter for her between two separate aspects of her own personality. That is, a design-oriented, more rational side imbued with technique with proportions and numbers, and a more chaotic side – a creative chaos – in which she expresses her more volcanic and creative part where she can indulge herself in a fantasy land of textiles, colours and materials endowed, as she is, with an instinctive skill at bringing them all together. After having frequented two years at the painting academy in Turin, Giorgia lost for a moment the artistic direction she had been striving to achieve and it was interior design that enabled her to enter into a career that would be more rational so that she would be able to realise to the best of her abilities the talents that she had always possessed along with her many design projects and design ideas. And that was how The Secret Home came about.

THE SECRET HOME

The Secret Home was created about ten years ago in Giorgia’s attic flat. It was a private home, a secret place and it was used as a showroom in which she could exhibit an exclusive collection of objects that ranged from design objects to art and decorative pieces, to colours, wallpapers and textiles.

In 2015, the project grew, and it was moved to Via Carlo Alberto, to the very heart of Turin. It didn’t lose its name, however, since it was the name which had distinguished it from its very beginning upon those age-old rooftops of the city. It isn’t possible to crystalise into one single definition the eclectic soul of The Secret Home. It’s a factory of creative ideas. It encloses into one unique space all of the services required for the world of interior design. As a common denominator, it follows the path of harmony in beauty. The secret home is, as a matter of fact, a creative studio which administers the restructuring and renovation of apartments, restaurants and other places in which people get together in order to enjoy themselves. However, it is also the stage for set designs for fashion companies as well as a location utilised for the organisation of events. Among the many projects that Giorgia has undertaken, she has managed – in all of its entirety – the very interesting design project centred upon the historic restaurant, the Goffi del Lauro, in Turin. The restaurant has been re-born in a wholly new guise with the new name of EraGoffi. As well as the design of the interior decoration, Giorgia, has also, in this particular case, worked on the brand identity of the new restaurant, its logo and its new name so that this project, brimming with history as it is (the restaurant hosted the great opera singers and artists of the time from the city’s Teatro Regio theatre), would once again bring back to life such a grand restaurant.

DAY TO DAY LIFE

“My days are often so very different from each other, and they might change according to the project that I am following at the time in question. I am little tempted by monotony and my inner energy is one of the motors that feed the engines of my creativity.

At the actual planning and design moment – the most delicate part of the whole process – I try to stay on my own as much as possible. I like the feeling of isolation and finding myself completely immersed within the project both day and night. When things move forward to the realisation stage, the works begin and the days become even more dynamic and unpredictable, too, I might add.… Works on the sites start very early in the morning and so I have to get up at the crack of dawn. In the afternoon, I make the rounds of all of the suppliers in search of unique materials and colours.

Travelling around is fundamental if you wish to get to know crafts and craftwork as well as the various materials on offer in every country you visit. In the design projects that I do I prefer ones-of-a-kind made by the hands and by the soul of each and every artist. A more open-minded mentality that you acquire when you discover different cultures helps you to be more empathic with your clients.

A home is a highly important place in the life of a human being, their very own nest and private little bubble. The role of an interior designer is steeped in responsibility towards the person or persons who entrust you with their houses.”

Fresco in a private residence © Mauro Coen

DESIGN PROJECTS

Every project that The Secret Home undertakes begins with a period of research and study and, therefore, it starts with an acquaintance with the actual space and the final objective is to find a “perfect” balance between light, shade, colours, proportions and, most important of all, an acquaintance with the person or persons who will be inhabiting that space. “I often find myself dwelling upon the houses that I am working on, as if they were real people with their strong points, their limitations and their origins. I analyse them so that I am eventually able to single out their DNA.”

Thanks to Giorgia we have the opportunity to look behind the scenes during the initial phase of a new project of hers. The Secret Home has been commissioned to manage, in collaboration with the architect, Gioacchino Alvente, the interior design of a private house, on the main floor, the piano nobile, of a sixteenth-century house in the centre of Rome. Giorgia is concentrating upon the study of the “skin” of the house, as she describes it: the walls, the history, the stratifications of the materials used over the centuries, its new life, and the new attire it will be dressed up in.

According to the documentary evidence that Giorgia has gathered from the State Archives in Rome, the house belonged to the family of Monsignor Guglielmo Sangaletti, the secret treasurer of Pope Pius V and secretary to Cardinal Ferdinando De’ Medici.

The Secret Home is also working on the retrieval – by means of a conservation-oriented restoration – of the magnificent fresco that decorates the main central hall of the house which is presumed to be the work of the sixteenth-century artist, Perin del Vaga, as stated by Vasari. The heraldic symbols of the Sangaletti family, as well as the families with whom they were intertwined over the years and through marriages, are all present in the fresco.  The allegorical representations of Night, Day and the Seasons – all impersonated by female figures – can be seen in it

It is fundamental for Giorgia that she can entrust her work to collaborators who are on her very same wavelength in terms of her professional philosophy. Only highly qualified restorers can carry out a conservation-oriented restoration by being able to exploit their excellent knowledge of materials and their exceptional sensibilities so that they may both seize and donate that primigenial harmony that had been conceived by the artist all those many years ago.

“One peculiar factor about very old houses is about enabling the guest to perceive the various histories of the houses. Through the architectural style, the paintings and the frescoes that characterise them, these houses transport the guest into another time.”

Design and history will, both together, illustrate the history of the house in Rome from the Sixteenth century right up to the present day: alternating opulence with decadence, important historic furniture and furnishings in rooms that are almost quite empty along with intense colours and modern hues. All of this will be framed by age-old techniques.

“The client has made specific requests around which I will try to imbue harmony and create a work of art,” Giorgia states.

Stay tuned if you desire further information on the design projects undertaken by The Secret Home. Let Giorgia Mirabella’s many-sided creativity combined with the odd pinch of folly overwhelm all of us.

Further Reading

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