VCA features in Interior Design October 2022 Issue,
“Verona Carpenter Architects Transforms a SoHo Loft into an Artful Home”
Laura Mattioli, an art scholar, curator, and collector, found her SoHo loft, and the one two floors up that now houses the Center for Italian Modern Art, on a tip from a friend back in 2011. A native of Milan, Mattioli had been looking for a place in Manhattan where she could open the foundation to spread the word about the modern and contemporary art of her homeland, but she needed a large, open space on one level that she could easily move works in and out of for exhibitions. Her friend had heard about a handsome cast-iron building on Broome Street with full-floor apartments that were about to come on the market. Mattioli immediately booked a flight to New York and within days she had nabbed two of them—one for CIMA and one for herself.
Finding an architect proved trickier than finding the space, however. The first two Mattioli hired were more interested in making a statement. But she wanted the architecture to take a back seat to the art—some inherited from her collecting father, some purchased herself. Then she discovered Irina Verona, co-principal of Verona Carpenter Architects, who understood Mattioli’s point of view. “We like the approach of ‘light architecture’ that respects the surroundings and what happens in it,” she says, speaking of the work she and co-principal Jennifer Carpenter have been doing together since founding their firm in 2017, after Verona had taken on Mattioli’s project.
Verona first completed the center, which opened in 2013. Then came Mattioli’s 4,500-square-foot apartment, which, because it was to be a home, would be “more personal,” the architect notes. But otherwise, the priorities remained largely the same—“quiet architecture for a lot of amazing pieces,” referring to both Mattioli’s art and furniture, much of it mid-century.
Read the full article on Interior Design.net here