Alberto Pinto, who passed away in 2012, was a great name in the world of interior decoration whose center was Paris, his home base. He designed apartments, company headquarters, hotels, yachts, and jets. He also designed a line of furnishing and gift objects. The studio is continuing to reinvent itself, driven by the new owner Fahad Hariri, a graduate of the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, who is passionate about art and design, supported by Pietro Scaglione, the house’s artistic co-director.
Pinto’s latest project is a special collaboration with Stefano Pilati, known for his creative direction work for some of the most famous fashion houses (just to name one: Yves Saint Laurent). He’s a tastemaker whose creativity is made into a lifestyle. The collaboration started when Hariri discovered Pilati’s experimental approach, a style, consisting of unexpected juxtapositions and actions, seemingly random, a style for which natural elegance is everything.
Two emblematic pieces came out of their first meeting: a sofa with a soft, slightly curved silhouette, upholstered in cotton canvas, doubled on the armrests to become draping that is minimalist and sumptuous at once; and a sofa-sculpture that recreates in bronze a chair that Pilati made for his vacation home, a woven rug thrown on a chair to make it an armchair.
These pieces are like limited edition pieces of art, when they are not extremely limited: thirty pieces for the sofa, only eight for the armchair. “This is my first project tied to interior design,” Pilati says. “I love decorating interiors, but I don’t work with interior designers. My style of decorating houses is something like how I’m in the habit of dressing. Two things that I really like to do.”
