You can now step inside Alessandro Mendini’s home: a villa on Lake Maggiore

130 works spanning the entire career of Alessandro Mendini — from his early years in Milan’s Radical Design movement to his projects for Alessi and his postmodern experiments of the 1990s and 2000s — are now on view at Villa Giulia, the historic 19th-century residence overlooking Lake Maggiore in Verbania. Running until September 27, 2026, the exhibition is one of the largest retrospectives ever dedicated to the designer, architect, artist, theorist, and two-time editor-in-chief of Domus, widely regarded as one of the most influential creative figures of his generation.

Titled “Alessandro Mendini. Objects. Rooms as worlds”, the exhibition is curated by art historian Loredana Parmesani and organized by the City of Verbania in collaboration with the Alessandro Mendini Archive. The show is structured around the idea of the room: rather than being displayed conventionally, the 130 works are distributed throughout Villa Giulia as though they were elements of a home — furnishings, presences, and fragments of autonomous imaginary worlds.

Each room features a key masterpiece selected together with Mendini’s daughters, Elisa and Fulvia Mendini. Highlights range from the Straw Armchair (1974) — an intentionally humble, anti-bourgeois seat created during the height of the Radical Design years — to the Proust Armchair (1978), perhaps the designer’s most iconic work: a neo-Baroque armchair covered in pointillist brushstrokes inspired by Paul Signac and dedicated to writer Marcel Proust.

One entire room is devoted to 100% Make Up, the project created for Alessi in 1992: one hundred porcelain vases identical in shape but decorated by one hundred different authors, from Mendini himself to Ettore Sottsass. Also on display is Jacket, from the Furniture for Men series — a monumental cabinet-sculpture produced with Bisazza in 1997 that transformed a men’s evening jacket into a domestic architecture clad in gold mosaic tiles.

Around each work unfolds a broader narrative composed of drawings, photographs, texts, paintings, and objects that reconstruct its genesis and theoretical context.

“Rooms were one of the guiding threads of Mendini’s research,” explains curator Loredana Parmesani. “The room, so dear to him, is a place of reflection, rest, quietness, and work, but also a place of turbulence and unease — one that can become a prison to escape through imagination.”

Designed by Alex Mocika, the exhibition layout takes advantage of Villa Giulia’s domestic architecture to transform Mendini’s universe into a house of rooms — a space visitors can inhabit, if only for a moment.