Q+A #017: TUTTO BENE [Interior, Architecture + Design Studio]
⚜️ Romantic Modernism 🍴 The Power Lunch 🕴️ Total Expression of One’s Identity 🖼️ 17th Century and Anonymous 🌱 Landscape! ⬛ Precise Interventions
‘Storied Spaces’ is the RIALTO newsletter featuring ‘Q+A’, a bi-weekly column that features guest curators from the community, whom we invite to share inspiration from their home library. In each edit, you will hear from creatives we admire about the analogue inspirations that inform their work and vision.
Tutto Bene is an ethos - A pursuit of simplicity, an optimistic approach, a commitment to excellence. Tutto Bene is the international interior, architecture, and design studio by Felizia Berchtold and Oskar Kohnen, based in London and Milan.
Founded on a partnership of curious minds, Tutto Bene builds spatial narratives on meticulous research. Their varied projects are unified by a distinctive atmosphere, constructed with a balance of historical reverence and modern minimalism. Organisation and discipline, measured with the intriguing and the beautiful - a principle of ‘romantic simplicity’.
Everything is good.
Instagram: @tuttobenestudio
Website: www.tutto-bene.com
Q+A
[001] What is your favourite interior you’ve come across and why?
Oskar: For me, it would be The Grill in the Seagram Building, NYC. It’s rooted in modernism, but also incredibly romantic. It’s very rational in its architecture, but at the same time it feels warm, glamorous and cinematic. We love those classic New York restaurants and brasseries – the anonymity of them, the idea of a power lunch, places that feel like everyone in them has a story. It’s all true materials: travertine, rosewood, brass, and the patterned carpet in shades of blush and browns. The chain curtains shimmer every time the air moves, there’s the Richard Lippold sculpture floating above the bar, cracked glass screens, and those completely panelled private rooms with Warhols hanging on the walls. Even the kitchen has this energy to it – apparently, there are people polishing glasses all day long. The place is designed very intentionally, but doesn’t feel staged.
Felizia: Mine is almost the opposite. There’s a villa on a hill above Portofino that belonged to the empress of Italian fashion publishing. It has largely remained as it was lived in, and you still feel traces of all the people who passed through there – family, friends, designers, artists. What I love is that it feels completely personal. The aesthetic is strict, but the compositions and atmosphere are incredibly free. It feels like a total expression of one person’s identity and way of life.
Today, so many interiors feel produced for images or become fantasies of themselves. This one is an actual phenomenon. It’s also an interior that is focused toward the exterior – the expansive terrace with the atom pine tree towering over the levels, the views across the bay, the weather moving over the horizon, the light changing several times a day. It extends beyond the boundaries of the room itself.
We spent our wedding week there, because it resonated with us personally, our life in Milan and aesthetic as well as intellectual leanings. It also encapsulates something we deeply love about Milan and fashion culture: the idea that style is a personal act of authorship. Because ultimately, interiors, like style, should tell you something about the person behind them.
[002] What is your favourite piece in your collection?
That changes constantly, but at the moment it’s a painting of Venus Pointing Cupid to Psyche (after Raphael). Dated to the 17th century and anonymous, it is copied from a fresco in the Loggia of Cupid and Psyche at Villa Farnesina in Rome. The fresco became a subject for students of painting and was reproduced many times over the years. There’s also a drawing of it in the Victoria & Albert Museum collection.
When we first saw our painting, it reminded Felizia of a painting we saw at the Prado in Madrid by Guido Reni, who was known for these graceful, harmonious figures and produced several variations of the Venus and Cupid theme throughout his career. The painting has this classical beauty, but there’s also something slightly strange and contemporary about it. Carrying traces of previous lives and stories of inspiration, there’s something grounding about being surrounded by a piece this old.
[003] Describe your dream interior if you had no budget restraints.
We actually don’t really believe that good things emerge from unlimited freedom. Most good projects come from constraints – context, budget, existing architecture, reality itself. We’re interested in working with what exists rather than escaping from it. But if we’re allowed to enter dream territory for a moment: we’d have an apartment with Paris facing west, Milan to the south, and New York looking east.
[004] What has piqued your interest lately?
Felizia: I’m glad you asked. Landscape! Completely and obsessively. Some personal life developments have made me fascinated by gardens and exterior spaces in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I’m reading everything I can find about gardens and plants right now. It feels like discovering something that was somehow already part of you, but you simply hadn’t noticed yet.
Our work is fundamentally about seeing, and gardens encourage us to practice the art of seeing… composition, space, volume, colour – but also seasons, growth, care, time and our inner gaze. We recently worked with Simone Gooch on the flower shop inside the Fornasetti showroom, which accelerated the obsession. I met Bas Smets at an opening in New York the other week and asked him for his top three books for an aspiring landscape architect. I’ll work my way through them.
Right now I’m reading Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison, which I picked up at the Fine Arts Museum in Boston. It’s captivating - philosophical, historical, and dangerous because it makes you want to leave the office and start digging up some soil immediately.
[005] Can you share images of your interior and tell us a bit about it?
Our Milan pied-à-terre sits in a turn-of-the-century palazzo near Magenta. It’s restrained in size and design, but decadent in atmosphere. It grew out of our daily rituals and how we wanted to live. For us, context is incredibly important. The apartment itself is a source of everyday inspiration – living within this history reminds us that, as designers, we’re participating in a wider ongoing discourse. We’re part of something bigger, channelling ideas that ultimately belong to a moment in time rather than purely to ourselves. Milan is such an industrial city, it balances with the romanticism in our space. The original terrazzo floors and the green light filtering through the surrounding trees became our starting point. We wanted the apartment to feel calm and clear.
For us, value appears through interaction rather than through excess. The elements within the space behave almost as objects for life: the kitchen as a unit, the wardrobe as a unit. Precise interventions inserted into a historic shell, allowing the existing architecture to continue dictating much of the atmosphere and energy. There’s a choreography to moving through it: cooking, working, gathering, stepping onto the terrace beneath the wisteria canopy. More than anything, it reflects how we live and work.
I. ‘Japanese Flower Arrangements’ by Seido Iwata, 1954
We love this book for the obvious qualities of harmony, balance and beauty, but also for the dialogue between nature and human care. We tend to gravitate towards anything made with a great deal of attention and devotion.
What is particularly striking is the photography. Being over seventy years old, the images sit somewhere between painting and photography – both graphic and soft, atmospheric in a way that makes you linger on the pages.
II. ‘Maria Pergay, Complete Works 1957-2010’ by Suzanne Demisch and Stephane Denant (Demisch Denant Gallery), 2011
What we love about Maria Pergay is that she worked outside of clear categories and schools of thought. This book reveals the full range of her work – from the pieces that are now celebrated and endlessly referenced by contemporary design, to more decorative and deeply client-specific interiors and commissions. There’s a lesson in that for us: the importance of continuing to make things, allowing work to evolve and resisting the pressure to remain stylistically fixed.
We also love this book because we admire the work Demisch Denant does as a gallery. Too much historic furniture and design is exhibited and sold in a purely object- and image-driven way. Researching, curating and producing books and archives feels like a more meaningful contribution to design culture. Since women have historically been given less visibility within design history, preserving and documenting this work becomes important in helping to shape and expand the narrative.
III. ‘Nelle case. Milan Interiors 1928-1978’, by Enrico Morteo & Orsina Simona Pierini
Cover of the Book, a book that we love, as it is a meticulous documentation of over 300 Milan interiors from the “golden age” of Italian design. Every project is accompanied by a 1:200 floor plan of the project. We always thought it was a shame that no one publishes plan drawings of interiors anymore. This book is an everyday bible for us.
Through our work with Fornasetti, we worked quite closely with the company’s archive and archivist. The collaboration between Gio Ponti and Piero Fornasetti was one of those great matches made in heaven, showing how figures who were so different worked together.
Ponti appreciated that, through decoration and artistic printing, a common, modern, industrial object could become something magical and theatrical. This duality, which we see in this collaboration, deeply inspires us.
