December 9, 1999
Lucretia Moroni: Illusion and the Art of Ornament
Related Article
Light to Make Walls Dance (Dec. 9, 1999)
Slide Show
Practicing Illusion and the Art of Ornament (9 photos)
By ELAINE LOUIE
ucretia Moroni is a mistress of illusion. What a set
designer does to the stage, she does to a home. When she paints on
panels of fabric, or on walls, ceilings and floors, surfaces become
mosaics, frescoes, taffeta. With paint, she conjures Moroccan
bazaars, Pompeiian courtyards, Indian souks. She makes visual
fantasies.
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Fred Conrad/The New York Times
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Lucretia Moroni: she paints fabric, walls, floors.
Slide Show (9 photos)
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Ms. Moroni's style, a subtle trompe l'oeil painted in exquisite
hues, is a legacy from Renzo Mongiardino, the Italian interior
designer famed for his voluptuous, intensely sensual rooms, who was
her mentor for four years in the early 1980s.
Ms. Moroni was 21 and living in Milan when a friend introduced
her to Mongiardino. "The first two years, I worked for free,"
said Ms. Moroni, now 38 and living in Manhattan.
In his Milan studio, she learned to paint poppies on silk
velvet, clusters of rubies, emeralds and sapphires on gauze. In
1984, he sent her to New York City for a year, where she helped
execute his designs for the apartments of William S. Paley and
Stavros Niarchos, who both lived at 820 Fifth Ave. She spent a lot
of time riding the elevator, with a clutch of painted fabric in her
hands.
From Mongiardino, who died last year at 81, Ms. Moroni learned a
singular lesson: a room is a three-dimensional painting. Minimalism
is not in her vocabulary.
Design sophisticates have never shied away from ornamentation,
of course, but the appeal of Ms. Moroni's work also reflects a
budding counter-current to today's stripped-down Modernism -- a
longing for sumptuous materials and luxurious patterning that's
showing up in fashion, fabrics, even restaurant interiors. There is
in her work a hint of fin de siecle extravagance.
Ms. Moroni was born to the world of textiles. Her family name,
which dates to 13th-century Bergamo, Italy, translates in the local
dialect as "berries of a mulberry tree." (The tree's leaves are a
silkworm's favorite food. Who knew?) Silk, a fabric her family
first imported and later manufactured, was the first canvas she
painted on.
Today her company, Fatto a Mano (Made by Hand), produces fabric
and wallpaper, and she does custom design. (Her initial consulting
fee for designing a room is $800 to $1,500.) Like Mongiardino, Ms.
Moroni practices a layered opulence. Her initial designs are dense
-- colors upon colors, borders around prints, prints on borders.
But her style is more lighthearted. "I first do it quite
layered," she said, "then I take away."
Her favorite motifs are Oriental, which she culls from Arab
mosques, Indian paisleys, Japanese kimonos. She is inspired by a
lotus on a Korean vase, the leaves of a ginkgo tree, pierced work
in an Islamic gate.
Thomas Jayne, a Manhattan decorator with whom she has
collaborated, notes that there was little pattern in midcentury
design, and what there was was small scale. "Lucretia's sense of
pattern is more expansive than her predecessors," he said.
For clients in a Tribeca loft, who wanted their home to evoke
Morocco, Ms. Moroni began, as she always does, by studying the
architecture. She noted that the loft did not have much natural
light and that not all the walls reached the ceiling. The design
was not coherent.
| Hands-On Luxe
When Lucretia Moroni designs a room, she does not work alone.
These are some of her favorite collaborators.
DTST DESIGN -- Victor and Claudia Escalante make upholstered walls. They stitch
fabric panels to thin wood frames, which are installed in front of
solid walls. A 9-by-12-foot panel costs around $750, excluding
fabric. The Escalantes also do window treatments. (212) 213-9164.
NEW YORK ROYAL UPHOLSTERY -- Anything Ms. Moroni needs upholstered, from sofas to pillows, is
done here by Michael Szugyi. Expect to pay $180 for a
24-inch-square pillow, exclusive of fabric. (212) 684-5504.
JEFFREY NASH LIGHTING DESIGN -- Jeffrey Nash is known for lighting artwork, but he also designs
lighting for libraries, bookcases and within window casings to add
interest to window treatments. (212) 206-8356.
KLUSKA CONSTRUCTION -- Marek Kluska, a general contractor in Brooklyn, specializes in
renovating brownstones and town houses. For Ms. Moroni, he has
prepared walls for painting, installed electrical wiring and built
bookcases. (917) 805-3211.
ELLEN FORD LTD. -- Fabric and wallpaper are sold to the trade under the name Fatto
a Mano by Lucretia Moroni at this showroom. Fabric sells for $120
to $350 a yard; silk-screened wallpaper sells for $35 to $60 a
roll. (212) 759-4420.
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"I started with the colors to make it become architecture,"
she said. In the living room, she painted the walls a warm yellow,
which she then rubbed with a rag, so that the color shifts subtly.
She painted the doors in the same direction as the wood grain,
which was sometimes vertical and sometimes horizontal, giving the
wood more texture. And on the front doors, she painted a Moroccan
motif, a six-pointed star, in gold leaf, mulberry and beige. The
result is a room that feels sun-drenched yet airy, and whose colors
change elusively with the light in the course of the day.
If Morocco suggests languor, there is a perfect corner for
languishing. An Indonesian caned chaise, with lavender cushions
silk-screened in gold, is set by the windows. The cushions are only
partly attached to the chaise; they don't slip off, yet the
original caning is visible.
Fluttering in front of the windows is a sheer panel of
silk-screened gauze -- mulberry on a pale yellow ground. The fabric,
printed in a curvy, Indian-inspired design, acts as a scrim.
Lighted from behind, as when the sunlight streams through, it's
transparent. At night, when the light is from within, it's opaque.
"Gauze is the best solution for people who don't want to lose
light but want a real screen at night," said Ms. Moroni, who
worked briefly as a set designer. "You can see through it or
not."
She kept the walls bare for the clients' photographs and
drawings. Instead, she treated the sofa pillows and the rug as
pictures -- abstract fields of color -- and framed them. Each
pillow is two colors -- one is cream on one side, peach on the other
-- and each side is edged in a different silk border, each painted
with arabesques of leaves and vines.
The taupe sisal rug became a floor painting the moment it got
its frame. Ms. Moroni painted a star motif, the same as on the
front doors, on a wide strip of linen, then had it stitched onto
the edge of the rug.
Like most artists, Ms. Moroni is fearless about color. Just as
the living room is serenely aglow in yellow, the bedroom is a study
of lavender without an ounce of grandmotherliness. The walls are
painted a striated lavender, a deft trompe l'oeil that looks like
watered silk. It was a trick that took three steps. She painted the
walls in one shade, then painted them with a slightly darker glaze.
Before the glaze dried, she took a dry brush and, stroking in
straight vertical lines, removed some of the glaze.
In her apartment on lower Madison Avenue, sheer panels of gauze
divide office from studio, and studio from living space. The walls
are hung with bolts of hand-painted fabrics. There are ochre and
olive leaves on a sheer rust-colored linen. A dusty blue scroll
motif is hand-painted on velvet woven to look aged -- bare-looking
in places. When she painted on the fabric, the pigments cracked,
making it look even older.
In her living room, the sofa is covered in a lavender silk
printed with oversize, abstract flowers in soft shades of
cornflower blue, rust and mulberry that shimmer in the light. The
design was inspired by one on a kimono. For the armrests, she
wrapped the lavender silk in a stripe-on-stripe silk that shades
from gold to tangerine to persimmon. On top of that, widely spaced,
are hand-painted lavender stripes.
The sofa, a field of flowers, sits in front of a white and
yellow wall with a border of mulberry flowers. And in a final
gesture of ornamentation, Ms. Moroni painted a part of the wood
floor in a cream-colored Persian motif, so that the sofa looks as
if it were sitting on fragile lace. This bit of painted whimsy is
not only permanent, but also allergy-free.
