80 Bold And Beautiful Interiors That Are Anything But Boring

Adorning almost every room were sumptuous murals from 18th-century Zagori merchants, having lain undiscovered for decades.

Now that it’s a museum, visitors can meander on down to discover the work of one of Belgium’s biggest architects.

Design studio Casa Josephine’s use of rare materials, from onyx to travertine, has turned this investor’s flat in Madrid from ‘empty box’ into treasure chest.

Once the émigré solved the challenge of transporting his materials 720 metres above sea level, the abode enjoyed a 270-degree panorama of wilderness, from the peaks to the Pacific Ocean.

1902 Milan flat of editore Massimo Vitta Zelman, one of Italy’s top publishers of art books and catalogues.

In the San Vicente Bungalows, a low-key California members’ club frequented by those in the know.

Folk-art aficionados will be humming with excitement at what the artist and honeybee guardian, Karina Czudnochowski, has achieved in her home.

Though their encounter proved ill-timed, his acolytes Barbara Wirth and Christian Badin picked up the baton after he died – a partnership that would teach the owner all she knows.

In fact, every passing cloud is the source of endless reflection, thanks to all the mirrored strips that line their bolthole in a Brutalist block.

There they’ll be accosted by wonky floors, forests of totem-like columns, the odd whale relief and a kaleidoscope of tiles.

In this Art Deco Gesamtkunstwerk all the creative disciplines unite to spectacular effect.

It’s the result of patient ministrations made gradually over 50 years.

Château Laurens drew for its inspiration from sources as diverse as Egyptian architecture, ancient Greek symbolism and Silk Road caravanserai. This surreal temple of dreams, recently restored and reopened to the public, would be at home in a tale spun by Scheherazade...

Plus, keeping with a tradition established in the 1920s, 30 buckets of flowers are cut from the garden and grounds each week, filling the house with arrangements – all based on the embroideries around them.

They’ve got them both by the lorry load, commissioning highly skilled phool patti artists to turn their cabs into prettified pads.

‘I call myself a folk artist, because I find it to be the most generous category,’ says Abe Odedina . ‘It’s a nice group to be a part of because it has a healthy relationship with history.’ His Salvador house attests: it is engulfed by artwork that he and his wife Sarah – who made the ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’ tapestry – have collected throughout their travels in Brazil.

Scenic-paper maestros Mehmet and Dimonah Iksel have fused French Hollywood Regency furniture with exquisitely detailed tableaux. In typical Iksel fashion, pattern meets pattern in almost every corner.

Fifty years ago, Salvador Dali was putting the finishing touches on what was to become one of his final masterworks, 'Gala Nude Looking at the Sea Which at 18 Metres Appears the President Lincoln'. He painted it here, in Port Lligat, Catalonia, where he and his wife Gala found home.

Waiting for the return of his fiancée, who was working away from home, Karl Junker – once a promising artist – began building a sprawling carved-wood house for their life together in the German town of Lemgo. But his betrothed never returned, abandoning him without a word.

Despite his undying passion for the styles of the 18th-century French courts, in later life Karl Lagerfeld drew increasing aesthetic sustenance from his childhood in northern Germany

Tapestry artist Brenda Goggs’s ‘ex-govie’ in Canberra was taken apart and remade anew – its layout perfectly tailored, indeed, to fit the vast, floor-to-ceiling frame on which she plies her craft.

‘Ugly’ is a floating cultural construct. It can attach itself to anything broken, deformed or on the margins. But we can also see that with bebop jazz, Surrealist art, or Brutalist architecture, a creative rupture with conventions of beauty is often the spur to progress.

Pictured here is fashion designer Johnson Hartig’s riotous library at his home in Los Angeles (WoI October 2021).

Dutch painter Dirk Jensma a former make-up artist, has found joy and inspiration aplenty in the town of Sóller on the northwest coast of Mallorca.

The artist’s home is a nautical grotto and a muse for her ever-growing shop, Shellegance.

Located in the city’s 7th district – once the heart of a thriving silk industry – the studio is part salon, part archive, and entirely enchanting.

Raising the roof and adding a suspended upper floor, the art director/decorator has filled his live-in studio with books, bric-a-brac, quirky bespoke furniture and the tools of his trade – textiles, embroidered trim and lamp-making materials. As he told Lee Marshall in our January 2018 issue, 'my job is all about atmosfera'.

n strode the late furniture and product designer Peter Ghyczy, whose antiques, ancestral portraits and space-age pieces still live in perfect harmony.

The red double doors in the first image, which were bought at an antique shop, conceal a hatch that leads to a wine cellar. Flanking them are floating glass shelves – a 1972 design and one of Peter's first. The large painting at left is by one of his ancestors, while the oval portraits have been in the house for generations. The ‘Garden Egg Chair’ is a limited-edition model in matte silver.

The place feels ‘like a sanctuary with the most incredible energy’, says Vogue’s star photographer.

Filling his lofty flat with antiques bought locally has been a culturally enriching adventure for the Australian émigré.

For one trio – up-and-coming gourmet Jago Rackham, artist Lowena Hearn and curator Tosia Leniarska – that means quite an array of cookware, objets, paintings, sculpture and, at least once a week, some very well-fed supper guests…

Stranded in a hilltop settlement in Tuscany during lockdown, Johnny and Elizabeth Petrucci lured a sequestered family home back to life.

Until February, when Isabella dalla Ragione presses them to make 50 litres of vin santo. She has spent over 40 years searching convents, family estates and abandoned farms for forgotten species of tree, bringing many back from the brink of extinction.

Renovated from a boxy 1930s basement apartment in Rome's Flaminio district, enlivening it with Empire-style furniture and spiky ceramics. In the bedroom, for example, to the left of a 17th-century Madonna and child is an Empire commode. Chomping a banana on top of it is a vintage ceramic monkey by Giovanni Ronzan.

The question foxed Gian Carlo Bussei the very moment he made his extravagant impulse buy. But after getting a protégée of Renzo Mongiardino on board, the dashing industrialist and poet decided to deck out the vessel’s interior like the most opulent Ottoman encampment.

Despite its remote location, he revitalised the factory with interventions that are as decorative as they are innovative.

Here, the photographer divulges how he has found things to do in the country and, touchingly, kept in contact with his home’s previous owners.

And the late artist happily used the unpainted surfaces of his early Victorian home in Peckham, south London, as a sketchbook, whether for scribbled phone numbers, drawn ideas or ‘notes to self’. Short on creature comforts, the place became a 3D embodiment of the owner’s mind.

Museum of Witchcraft and Magic director Simon Costin conjures a new look for his 16th-century Cornish long-house, Dockacre.

From the ‘old village’ green tones to the rustic redwork trim pinned on the shelves, Villa Pepita sings of it’s modest origins.

Why? The project was to have been orchestrated by her husband, the fashion designer Emanuel, but his [passing] in 2019 necessitated a mournful change of plans. As a widow, Laura would have to face the new place alone, but at least the collecting passions of her life partner were everywhere in evidence.

Helped by Farrow & Ball’s Patrick O’Donnell, he’s made Impressionist blues, Dior pinks, and Prada greens unfold with unexpected harmony.

For those looking to recharge their batteries and tap into the island’s innate inspiration.

The blue-and-white lamp, a memento from her mother’s home in Belgium, sits on the bedside table. Next to it is a 1960s ‘Les Arcs’ chair, designed by Charlotte Perriand.

Every June, in the tribal villages of Hazaribagh, northeast India, the heavy rains come, washing away the vernacular Khovar designs adorning mud-hut walls. Somehow, their fleeting nature makes them all the more precious.

When she bought the place in 2023, all the floors came up and the fake ceilings came down.

Has played host to a motley band of bloodspattered trackers over the years – opera composer Giacomo Puccini among them – drawn to the lodge by the region’s abundance of game. Since Paolo and Maria Cattaneo got their hands on the place in the 1970s, though, they’ve managed to tame it into a family home – but that’s not to say the couple have banished its historic chasseur chic.

But now the spoils from her adventures, as showcased in her 17th-century home in Paris, are going under the hammer as she embarks on another thrilling new chapter.

Surrounded by acre upon acre of aromatic citrus groves – not to mention 40,000 first-edition books now in her care – Fiona Corsini di San Giuliano couldn’t be more content in her ancient masseria on Sicily’s eastern coast. The châtelaine, who’s an artist, gardener and retreat host, attributes it all to providence, though Marella Caracciolo Chia would beg to disagree.

The home of collectors Andrea Zanatelli and Kenny Spooren is one such hidden gem, appearing in a new book documenting the beauty, idiosyncrasy and romance of Italian interiors.

Decorated with a collection of art created by famous friends or picked up at auction. For instance: numerous posters, among them a local newsbill announcing JM Coetzee’s 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, a stencil poster for the Workers International Vanguard League from 1994, and The Liverpool Echo’s announcement of the capture of Pretoria in 1900. The lantern was acquired in Rajasthan.

Over three years, the couple converted this fortified farming hamlet into a vast holiday home, then steeped it in allusions to the great empire based in Italy. Nor have they neglected the illustrious figures, from Goethe to Picasso, who subsequently drew inspiration from the ancients.

The pictures also reveal, says Mitchell Owens, why she was America’s William Morris.