Style Magazine: Osvaldo Borsani's own Villa Borsani
I highly recommend reading the article “Outside Milan, a Living Testament to the Powers of Italian Modernist Design.” Here, Nancy Hass, with the support of Mikael Olsson’s photographs, describes the unique modern style of Villa Borsani. The villa that Italian designer and architect Osvaldo Borsani designed and built in Varedo, in northern Italy, for his family right next to the family’s furniture making company.
The villa’s style, although inescapably modern, presents an unashamed fondness for incorporating neoclassical and baroque cues.
Interior of Villa Borsani. Picture by Mikael Olson for NYT's Style Magazine
For this project, Osvaldo Borsani included works and collaborations with many of Italy’s preeminent modern designers and artists such as: Lucio Fontana, Fausto Melotti, Agenore Fabbri, Antonio Voltan, and Adriano Spilimbergo.
In the article, Hass also explores Osvaldo Borsani’s unique modern approach to design and the artisanal-cum-industrial production approach that he used in Tecno, the furniture company that he created alongside his brother Fulgenzio. The Villa Borsani was, in fact, an extension of the Tecno factory “so the boundaries between the factory — six stories of poured and precast concrete — and the 8,000-square-foot palazzo next door were porous. The contrast of the structures, and the ease with which the family traversed the eras, was a living illustration of how artisanal craftsmanship could coexist with mass production.”