AD Magazin, November 2024 (auf Deutsch)
AD Italia, January 2025 (in italiano)
Emanuela and Marco Frattini both remember when, sometime around 1970, their father said he needed to show them something in Portofino. Gianfranco Frattini was one of the most sought-after architects in Milan, but work and family were kept separate and the children, then 11 and 9, were rarely brought along to project sites. That summer evening, he led them up a narrow staircase of a pastel-yellow house and opened the door to a bare apartment: only one room, smaller than the living room at home in Milan, centred around one vast window that framed a postcard-perfect view of Portofino's waterfront piazzetta. "He asked, 'so do you like it?'" says Marco. "'Because this is your house now.'"
Born in 1926, Gianfranco Frattini was part of Italy's great generation of mid-century designers: in the 1950s, he was classmates at Milan's Politecnico with Gae Aulenti and Joe Colombo, and apprenticed for years with Gio Ponti (the children grew up with 'Il Gio' as an upstairs neighbour). Frattini designed his first lounge chair for Cassina at age 27, and could at one point take credit for over half, by sales volume, of the famed furniture-maker's offering. But nearly two decades after his death in 2004, Frattini is less of a household name than some of his peers, perhaps because out of a stellar oeuvre of interiors – an English gentlemen's club in Milan, a red-carpeted jewellery boutique in Turin, a luxury hotel on Anacapri – only a handful of private residences remain intact. None is better preserved, or more telling of the architect's life and work, than the small Portofino pied-à-terre that was Frattini's own summertime family house and year-round personal refuge.
"Every detail was decided by him," says Emanuela, who is seated on a leather butterfly chair next to the open window, with seagulls flying past and late-autumn sun angling in. "It was not a project with family symposiums." Before telling the children about their new holiday home, Frattini had already purchased it from one of the local women that, in those times, could be found winding bobbin lace by the water. The place had been a small chapel where the fishermen came to pray before going out to sea. "You see, it's a bit ecclesiastic," says Emanuela, pointing to a wooden beam above the entrance door carved with the Christian letters IHS. But before soon, the vaulted ceilings had been painted a pale pink, two loudspeakers discretely embedded in the outer wall, and a small niche, where communion bread used to be stored, turned into the bar corner. "The path of this place went from Eucharist to whisky," says Marco with a laugh.
A nautical theme runs clearly through Frattini’s design, with teak plank flooring laid like in a boat, and models and posters of ships populating most surfaces. But the furniture it is filled with, from a supple black leather sofa to a table lamp covered in stretched jersey, is more evocative of an upscale member’s club. Most of Frattini’s designs were created for specific projects, which included the legendary Stork Club in Milan and the Spinnaker in Genoa. "At that time, architects had to design the furniture for their interiors, because what they needed just didn’t exist on the market," says Emanuela. The main light source, a seductive streak of small bulbs inlaid in British racing green-coloured wall panels, is also a mainstay in many of Frattini’s projects.
If the result lands somewhere between boat cabin and bachelor pad, it is all the more impressive that the 39-square-metre apartment could, in fact, host all four family members. The feat is pulled off thanks to custom-made mahogany cabinetry, which stretches across the length of one wall and divides the room with two built-in beds and a desk. By folding up the desk and pushing aside the living room furniture, an additional double bed can be slid out from a lightly raised section of the floor. The kitchen table folds down from the cabinet, while the chairs, shaped like one-quarter pie slices, can be neatly gathered around the apartment's only out-facing corner when not in use.
The family typically spent all of July in Portofino, making do with a kitchen equipped with only a small fridge and two hobs, and a tiny washtub in the bathroom (a shower is a recent addition). "It was exactly like living on a boat, just on firm ground," says Emanuela. “Luckily, in the summers you were outside all day.” She recalls jet skiing around the peninsula of Portofino, taking turns at the steering wheel with her father, on one-way trips that lasted entire afternoons. Marco played football every day in the piazza with local kids. "We took four chairs from a bar as goalposts and had a game," he says. "From time to time, of course, a ball would end up hitting someone's table, but it was more tolerated back then."
1970s Portofino provided dolce vita in excess, with Italian industrial tycoons rubbing shoulders on the piazzetta with Frank Sinatra and the Onassises. Many of the bon vivants' favourite haunts were designed by Frattini: the legendary Le Carillon nightclub in nearby Paraggi, an Emilio Pucci boutique and an American cocktail bar on the harbour, plus nearly a dozen private homes. The architect himself, however, didn't frequent this glitzy social circuit. "We have photos of him with the fishermen and the restaurant-owner, who came up here for a glass of grappa after work," says Marco. "He preferred these frank relationships to socialite dinners."
The siblings see a parallel between Frattini's social life and his highly democratic approach to design. "He didn't feel like a master on a pedestal who just handed away the sketch," says Emanuela. "He had a lot of respect for the people realising his ideas." Much of his working hours were spent at workshops and factories, where he preferred to speak in Milanese dialect. "He was always there, chatting to the person operating the machine," says Marco. Some of Frattini's closest friends were also the craftsmen he worked with, such as the cabinetmaker Pierluigi Ghianda, who was a frequent weekend guest in Portofino.
The apartment also features their most important collaboration: the Kyoto table, conceived in 1974 after a trip the pair took to Japan. Inspired by the country's craftsmanship, they created a latticed wooden table that slots onto x-shaped legs using no screws or even a drop of glue. Other pieces in the apartment present like a roll call of Frattini's career highlights. There are four moss-green Marema side tables (named after Marco and Emanuela), designed for Cassina in 1967, which can be slotted neatly together or balanced on top of each other. Tucked into the bar nook is the Boalum lamp, a snake-like light that took inspiration from a vacuum hose and was developed with Livio Castiglioni, another close friend, and is still in production with Artemide.
"My father's design motto was 'from the spoon to the city,'" says Emanuela. In Portofino, that ideal was put into practice: Frattini carefully thought out every item in the flat down to the tableware, but also sat on the communal building commission, where every change to the urban fabric had to garner his approval. "They still have tremendous respect for him here," says Marco. "Locals call him simply l'architetto – he was the architect of Portofino."
Frattini never stopped working, and though the preferred ride went from a Ferrari Spider to a more reliable Lancia Delta, he never stopped coming down to Portofino. Into his late 70s, the architect still visited around three times per month and continued to work on projects in the region. It was also here, while seated at a bar on the piazzetta, that Frattini suffered a stroke that would be fatal. He was alone, intending to visit a building site in Cinque Terre a short way south on the riviera.
Frattini's workload had dwindled in the last decades of his life ("he hated postmodernism," says Emanuela), but now the architect's star has started to rise again. In the past years, dozens of Frattini's designs have been put back into production by Tacchini, Poltrona Frau, Artemide, Torri Lana, Bernini, and most recently American brand CB2. Each reissue is carefully vetted by the two heirs – Marco manages the estate full-time, while Emanuela also runs an acclaimed architecture practice in New York – who in parallel are gradually making his archive publicly available online. "Our main interest is for our father to become recognised for his work," says Marco. "He never liked to market himself."
On the Gianfranco Frattini website, there is also a snapshot of the architect in his Portofino home. Taken in 1977, the black-and-white image shows him leaning over the desk, dressed in a crisp pointed collar and a dark, fitted sweater. Spread out in front of him is a glass filled with pens, a ruler, and desktop organiser. The in-built Bang & Olufsen vinyl player peeking out would most likely have been spinning a disc by Gershwin, Fitzgerald or Armstrong. Around him, the consoles are lined with objects: a model ship, an ashtray of his own design, a glass vase holding a Japanese uchiwa fan. Frattini is looking down at an open notebook with a pencil in hand, the tip hovering above an unfinished sketch.
45 years later, many of the items in the photo can still be found in the apartment – some even in the same spot – but the home isn't being treated like a museum. Both Emanuela and Marco stay there several times a year; their adult children take turns visiting with their own families. "Just to set the table you have to complete a course of yoga," laments Marco, while fumbling for the cutlery drawer tucked under the fold-out table. Yet altering one of their father's last intact interiors, a room that reads like a distillation of his career, is out of the question. Even a used tram ticket from Milan is still pinned with a magnet to the wall, exactly where Frattini left it. Emanuela is hardly just talking about the apartment's former, religious purpose when she says: “this is a sacred place.”
