Designer Marcel Wanders Offers Rare Look Inside Milan Home

“I’ll create you a heaven, if I can be your star.” It is a motto Marcel Wanders uses when embarking on any new project.

“I’m here to create an environment of love…live with passion, and make my most exciting dreams come true,” the award-winning designer tells WWD from his oasis of a home in Milan, rarely seen by journalists. The two bedroom, two bath apartment is furnished with his designs for Moooi that bridge the metaphysical world with reality.

Just a few steps from the Centrale Station, Wanders’ abode is drenched in white and punctuated in a vivid pink and is immaculate. “We cleaned a bit before you came,” he jokes.

Three and a half years ago, Wanders traded the canals of Amsterdam for the bustling streets of the fashion capital, which he navigates by bike like a true Dutchman. While he’s mastered the design world, the 63-year-old artist has just started to cook. His model kitchen is aglow with NomNom Lights by Odin Visser for Moooi and his kitchen appliances are top of the line made by Asko. The stuccoed cement cabinets, he says, were made by what he calls “magic,” offering no other details.

The Art of Milan Living

While he still travels most of the year, life has quieted since closing his studio a few years ago, an endeavour that involved finding new jobs for every single one of his 80 employees. Wanders lives with his girlfriend Caterina Roppo, an Italian multidisciplinary artist and sculptor and textiles specialist who works between Milan and Palma de Mallorca.

Inside their home, a shrine to Wanders’ designs and a tribute to Moooi, the firm he cofounded in 2001 and of which he is creative director, his vision comes to life. In addition to the foam padded Monster dining chairs, his embrace of a BFF sofa, Eek dresser and the iconic Heracleum III The Big O by Bertjan Pot for Moooi, there are also some of his own personal projects.

In and around the apartment are sculptures made from pink silk flowers he wove himself into standing branches. One can’t help but call to mind “The Eurasian Garden” he created as an art installation at Japan’s Oita Prefectural Art Museum in 2015. The exhibit featured five-meter high balloons with flower-patterned faces symbolic of the cultural exchange between Holland and Japan, inspired by Dutch explorers arriving in the 16th century. It was also a celebration of the sort of Dutch openness, the spirit of exploration and wonder that Wanders so nonchalantly conveys in his works.

Wanders also recalls making small gifts when he was a child who spent time in the back of his parents “everything” shop that sold home goods, toys, stationary and even watches. It was there he began experimenting with craft. “I made little puppets nuts and bolts or a crystal creations for my aunts,” he recalls. “As a kid, you know, it’s beautiful. And I always was the best kid of the family because I made such beautiful things for them. So I’m like, ‘This is great. They love me if I make beautiful things.’”

A Legendary Career

Over the course of his career that launched with his design of the Knotted Chair for Cappellini in 1996, Wanders has created other worlds and immersive, multilayered sensory experiences. He’s made more than 2,500 iconic products and interior design experiences for top brands like Alessi, Fendi Casa, Droog Designs and even tableware for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Some of his notable projects include globally iconic designs such as the Andaz Amsterdam Prinsengracht; a whimsical “Alice in Amsterdam” experience and the Mondrian Doha. He has also worked on private residences in Amsterdam and Mallorca, in the Middle East and Asia and more.

Wanders’ designs are featured in prestigious collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. In 2014, a major retrospective, “Marcel Wanders: Pinned Up at the Stedelijk” was hosted in Amsterdam, featuring more than 400 iconic pieces across multiple mediums.

Elsewhere in the home are artworks by Roppo — swathes of textiles crystallized in bronze and others hung as tapestries that tell the journey of trauma overcome. At the core of her work lies the belief that trauma is not an exception but a structural condition of the present. There is also the visual artwork “Origin of the Beginning” by Levi van Veluw, playing on rotation in a frame in the dining room. Van Veluw is known for his sculptures of clay and wood made entirely by hand using wooden blocks to construct faceless versions of his family members and their surroundings.

Crafting the Future

In the living room sits the Hortensia pouf by Andrés Reisinger and Júlia Esqué for Moooi. The creation of the Hortensia was one of the first times a NFT was made into something tangible in the design world. It also marked a time when Wanders wasn’t afraid to take a risk.

“I think independent of NFTs, the chair was a remarkable piece. I saw the videos before it was an NFT. I saw it as an NFT. I saw how people reacted on it and it was a magic thing in a way. And also I understood that, you know, it was understood to be the impossible chair,” he says, recalling the chance he took on singer Robbie Williams who debuted the Introvert chair, which was purely a physical design for Moooi at Design Miami, marking his debut as a furniture designer. “I was like I am not going to do it just because Robbie is famous…it’s really remarkable…an innovative piece.”

After all, Wanders’ revolutionary spirit is perhaps what has built his design philosophy. Before graduating cum laude from the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten — now ArtEZ Institute of the Arts — in Arnhem in 1988, he was expelled from the Design Academy Eindhoven. “It was because I don’t follow the rules. I felt that design is culture and is creative, so you really have to come up with something new and something interesting,” he says.

Today Wanders is still pioneering design’s future, testing the realms of the traditional, fighting complacency in a design world built on old codes. He continues to ponder the impossible. “Maybe in 20 years we will be living in the metaverse and in your computer and you will not have a physical body anymore, but today, we are still physical beings. Today, we are still going through life every day, touching, smelling, tasting, feeling.”