The Kaiser’s Apartment and the Purity of Form

Line obeys a discipline that lets scale grow without loss of proportion and keeps expansion from courting display while preserving a quiet inward order

Marta Sala looks toward the parts most interiors leave unattended, the back of a seat, the underside of a joint, those areas that reveal how an object carries the body over time and how drawing survives repeated use. These surfaces speak quietly yet with insistence, exposing whether a piece can endure attention rather than merely attract it.

Colour carries weight in her work. Dense textiles absorb volume without blurring its structure, and walnut joints settle into one another with a firmness inherited from Japanese carpentry, allowing tables to resolve their height through the behaviour of the material rather than through imposed scale.

Her Milanese sensibility grew inside the workshops of Azucena the family design house founded by her mother Maria Teresa Tosi alongside her uncle Luigi Caccia Dominioni shaped by tolerances patient adjustment and a respect for the time of making long before design became a deliberate pursuit.

At Bel Ouvrage, Carole de Bona composes the space with a quiet exactitude, letting objects settle into their place so that looking becomes a form of reading rather than a rush of visual effect.

The apartment on Rue de Verneuil deepens this atmosphere. Spare and contained, it once served as visual refuge for an eye overstimulated by constant immersion in fashion and image, restoring a quieter mode of attention and allowing objects to settle into presence rather than dissolve into immediacy.