#CASADIJUHANA | Maurizio Giovannoni Studio

The apartment is a little penthouse (about 65 mq.) in Turku, Southern Finland.
Before renovation, too many walls and doors blocked the spaces and the passage of light, and the most beautiful view of the historical sites of Turku was on the bedroom side. My principal goal in this project was letting the light flow in and creating a relaxing livingroom where my customer could do his creative work.
The partial demolition of walls was a natural consequence, along with reversing the location of the bedroom and living room. After fixing this, we decided on the overall “concept” together with my customer, organizing all the details that colored the white spaces. That happened during my customer’s visit to Rome (due to my impossibility to travel in that period), and via 4oo e-mails between Turku and Rome. The result is what I now consider my style: a blend of cultures. There is nothing that stimulates me more than to study different countries and make some cultural themes recognizable but never intrusive in the project. In this case, the floor is covered with parquet of white ash, the shelves are birch and the kitchen table is also birch but colored with heat. Wood is a omnipresent element in this flat as it constantly is for Finnish people, but the real attention is catalyzed by the nature theme pictured on wall paper of the livingroom , carrying colours and contrasts and a typical Mediterranean “courage”. The furniture itself in the livingroom is a mix of the 2 cultures and of past & present: the grandmother’s armchair is a piece of Finnish vintage from the sixties as is the red floor lamp. The arc framing the wall paper is the famous Twiggy by Foscarini and the suspended lamps are Italian as well:Olimpia by Ideal Lux. Everything fits together in perfect harmony!


After deciding the details of the livingroom, we moved to design the bedroom,with my client’s words in mind: "I wanna live in a jungle and dive into a dream".
The bedroom too, collects elements from different sources, based on the central idea of dream and fairy-tale. There are pieces of emerging designers who we met at our travels in that period in Turkey, France, Finland and Italy. The bedroom has the honor of hosting a great guest: Bimba Landmann, a famous Italian illustrator who designed an incredible wallpaper specially for the customer.
So describes Bimba Landmann her thoughts around the project: “The client wanted to have a wallpaper to the bedroom in color blue. Blue like night. Blue like a deep sleep and dream. We imagined the silence of the Finnish nature, the frozen trees with white branches like caramels, a winter that covers everything like a white mantle. And a big mysterious face that dreams or meditates or maybe protects all this… who knows. I tried to leave this mystery untouched. I wanted to evoke the charm of the childhood when the world around us was full of magic.”