Beauty rediscovered

Time in design has no boundaries. She is conviced of it, Paola Moretti, an interior designer with a long journey – between Paris, London, the United States and her native Brescia – in author’s cinema, fashion and styling. Elisabetta Morandini, an art collector and fashion expert, is convinced of this and has entrusted her with the arduous task of transforming the main floor of an ancient and imposing palace – halls and salons with high ceilings and elaborate wall decorations of the late eighteenth century – into an apartment inspired by cultured and refined minimalism. A place that, in certain twilight hours, might seem austere, were it not for the experimental current that runs through it all and that can only be defined in one way: a passion for art and author’s design. We are in the historic center of Brescia, a jewel of Renaissance culture and architecture nestled in the vast and rich expanse of Po, just a few kilometers from the crystal-clear shores of the romantic Lake Garda. The lioness of Italy, a name that refers to the courageous resistance of its citizens to the Austro-Hungarian rule during the years of the Renaissance, is an industrious, reserved city. Rare, here, to find excessively sumptuous houses, which are eye-catching. And so when Elisabetta Morandini decided to transform the opulent interiors steeped in history of Palazzo Martinengo della Motella, dating back to the fifteenth century, into a contemporary home for herself, her industrial husband and their young daughter, she spontaneously came to turn to Paola Moretti, an interior decorator who hates conventions and who made sobriety her mantra. A woman whose aesthetic sense, who does not hesitate to define, with a wax of irony, “an ugly beast with whom I have learned to convince”, does not prevent her from creating, for herself and for others, “real spaces” – the definition is hers – which, in addition to reflecting the tastes of those who live there, are also livable and efficient. A complex project, admits Moretti, not so much because of the abundance of space – a first row of halls side by side on the street and another, parallel, opening onto a beautiful inner courtyard – nor because of the classicity of the pictorial and architectural decorations, but because of a previous renovation, she explains, which had damaged the original patina of this building, distorting it.