TWO YEARS AGO, the Spanish filmmaker Albert Moya got here to Florence to go to an artist pal who’d unwittingly change into the caretaker of a giant household property, left empty after a well-known Italian author died, on the outskirts of city. Moya was staying close by, on the tumbledown lodge Torre di Bellosguardo, when he realized that one other unlikely (and fairly unusual) residence had change into accessible. It was within the space — the southwestern Florentine hills, quiet and virtually suburban, the place households have lengthy bought properties with views of the Duomo — so Moya determined to cease by. “Anybody who lives right here appears on the market on a regular basis,” he says over espresso one frosty December morning. “There’s nothing [available], actually. So when one thing comes up, it’s form of pornographic.”
The director, 34, was raised in a village of 800 individuals outdoors of Barcelona, however has spent most of his maturity in New York and Paris, the place he creates movies for luxurious manufacturers like Loewe and Louis Vuitton. He entered the style world by chance: The Belgian designer Dries Van Noten was the primary to rent him, after seeing his 2012 quick, “American Autumn,” a couple of group of New York Metropolis schoolchildren internet hosting a Surrealist ceremonial dinner. Moya had come to Italy partly to work on the script for his debut function — “about three brothers and their daddy points, principally” — primarily based on an concept he mentioned with the Athens-based screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, finest identified for collaborating with the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos on movies like “The Lobster” (2015).
Moya initially deliberate to discover a extra everlasting residence in Paris after his working vacation. As an alternative, after visiting the two,475-square-foot residence, he determined to remain in Florence so he may write in solitude. When he toured the rental, “it was filled with crap however empty of individuals,” he says, noting that the final occupant, who purchased the place within the Seventies and nonetheless owns it, was an Italian soccer participant who “had this superb style and consciousness of house and structure.” Located on the sunny second ground, it was certainly one of 4 flats parceled out within the Nineteen Fifties from a 14th-century Tuscan property, Villa di Marignolle, that when belonged to the Medicis. The astronomer Galileo Galilei stayed right here a number of occasions within the seventeenth century, till the household of inventive patrons ultimately offered it off. Maybe to counterbalance the home’s intact Renaissance-era frescoes, oak window frames and doorways and enormous backyard crowded with cypress timber, the proprietor had adorned many of the rooms with numerous sorts of shiny however good-looking wooden paneling for the flooring, the arches that divide them and the railings of two lofted inside balconies. These ranges are reached through their very own staircases at both finish of the cavernous, 50-by-16-foot residing space, from which the only real bed room and small kitchen and loo department out. “I like empty areas and full austerity as a result of I journey for work. After I’m residence, I would like calm,” Moya says. “However right here, the query was, ‘How will we respect the woodwork?’”
“THE RULE,” MOYA determined, “was no furnishings, no nothing,” except for a number of easy birch eating chairs by Frama, a Copenhagen-based design agency, that line the entry vestibule. “I simply needed a spot that’s actually pure.” A lot of the principle room is given over to a shallow dialog pit that existed when he moved in, though he eliminated sofas round its perimeter to make means for piles of wool-covered pillows that he hoped would encourage his pals, who usually go to from different international locations, to lie round and daydream collectively whereas staring up on the weathered 23-foot-high post-and-beam ceiling. A type of company was the 38-year-old architect Guillermo Santomà, a fellow Catalonian with whom Moya deliberate the overhaul and whom he left alone for every week throughout its set up. By the point Moya returned, Santomà had coated many of the house — together with the lounge space, the eating room (together with its spherical desk and curved benches), the steps to the mezzanine degree, the pair of mezzanines themselves and the bed room ground — in mocha carpeting that feels particularly comfortable and plush in opposition to all of the honey-toned wooden. Within the middle of the 20-by-12-foot bed room, the duo put in a low mattress coated in white alpaca fur, with a raised picket body bordering it that’s upholstered in the identical brown rug, in lieu of a standard mattress: “The rule right here is to not carry any computer systems or telephones,” Moya says, in order that he and his guests would possibly go to sleep by the sunshine of a number of candles on an altar alongside the wall.
All over the place else, although, the place is engineered much less for relaxation than for productiveness. On one balcony, there are blush pink develop lights, the stays of a marijuana-cultivation experiment; on the opposite, there’s a retro weight lifting rig, with a leather-based punching bag and black iron barbells. Beneath that, in a nook of the lounge between two home windows overlooking the well-tended grounds, Moya constructed a big enhancing station with 4 movable screens that resembles a Louise Bourgeois spider by means of “The Matrix.” Between the spareness of the inside — they’ve added no artwork and only a few objects — and the monochromatic palette, the dwelling is undeniably cinematic, like a dystopian film set, even when the director has already determined to shoot his personal function in a brown brick and red-tiled summer time home accomplished in 1973 by the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill on the Costa Brava, not removed from the place Moya grew up.
Florence, nevertheless, has impressed him to complete what he got down to do. “There’s nothing that ties collectively all of the artistic individuals and artists right here, so it’s tougher to be in contact with each other,” Moya says. “I don’t exit a lot.” Largely he writes into the night, lazing on a rug as brown as his corduroys, laptop computer resting on a picket ledge close by, as he watches the solar fade behind the hills reverse the beige metropolis. Solely then will he be saved firm by the floating plexiglass gentle sculpture that Santomà designed and put in subsequent to the dialog pit, which glows in any hue desired and appears like one thing out of James Cameron’s “Avatar” sequence. “In the mean time,” Moya says of the lamp, “that’s my boyfriend.”
