The Duo Brings Their Cinematic World Into The Home With More Than 200 Pieces Spanning Furniture, Interiors And Fashion
Luca Guadagnino and Stefano Baisi are bringing their shared approach to cinema, architecture and interiors into the home with a new collaboration for Zara Home, encompassing more than 200 pieces across furniture, lighting, tableware, textiles, rugs, decorative objects and ready-to-wear.
Launching worldwide on September 26, Baisi Guadagnino for Zara Home is the retailer’s most expansive collaboration to date. The project marks the first time the creative partnership developed between Guadagnino and Baisi across film, fashion and interior architecture has been translated into a complete collection for the home.
Guadagnino, the Director and Filmmaker behind films including “Call Me by Your Name,” “Suspiria” and “Challengers,” has increasingly extended his work beyond cinema into architecture and design. Baisi, an Architect and Production Designer, has worked with Guadagnino for nearly a decade, helping construct the highly considered environments that have become an integral part of the Director’s visual language.
Titled “Atlas of Desire,” the Zara Home project approaches interiors as a collection of personal choices rather than a single design system. Furniture, lighting, scent, color and clothing are treated as parts of the same environment — an attempt to translate the world-building familiar from Guadagnino and Baisi’s cinematic work into objects that can exist independently in the home.
The collection moves across several periods and schools of design without adhering strictly to any one of them. References include the geometry of Viennese Secessionism, French Art Deco, Brazilian Modernism and Italian Radical Design, resulting in furniture and objects characterized by curved, folded, swollen and enveloping forms.
The accompanying imagery reinforces that eclecticism. Rather than presenting the pieces against neutral studio backgrounds, furniture, lighting and decorative objects are arranged within richly layered domestic interiors. Deep woods, patterned walls, sculptural seating, irregular rugs and dramatic lighting create rooms that feel inhabited rather than staged as conventional product displays.
Each object has also been given its own name, with pieces called Purkersdorf, Nape, Ophiuchi, Blinking and Sacred Spring, among others. The naming system extends the project’s idea of furniture as something with an emotional or associative identity beyond its practical function.
The collaboration reaches beyond interiors with a ready-to-wear collection conceived without a conventional division between men’s and women’s wardrobes. Its starting point is menswear tailoring, which is loosened and exaggerated through volume and proportion.
Tweed and fresco wool are moved away from their traditional formal context, while the collection draws on Belgian approaches to color and unexpected combinations as well as Japanese ideas around volume and silhouette. Sculptural dresses provide another counterpoint, creating a wardrobe in which masculine and feminine references are deliberately allowed to overlap.
Cinema remains an important part of the project. Guadagnino has directed a short film written by Scott Z. Burns, whose screenwriting credits include “Contagion,” “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “The Report.” The film stars Jamie Bell, Chase Sui Wonders, Michael Stuhlbarg and Patricia Arquette and was shot in Europe to accompany the collection’s launch.
Baisi serves as Production Designer on the film, while the pair have also designed the collection’s presentation in Zara Home stores, extending the same creative language across the products, campaign and physical retail environment.
The project represents a significant expansion of Zara Home’s approach to designer collaborations. At more than 200 pieces, it allows Guadagnino and Baisi to work at the scale of an entire environment rather than a capsule of individual objects — moving from the sofa and dining room to lighting, fragrance and clothing.
The collection will also have a physical debut during Milan Fashion Week. On September 26 and 27, Zara Home will stage a two-day public pop-up at La Pelota in Milan within a site-specific installation created by Guadagnino and Baisi. The installation will be open from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. on both days.
Baisi Guadagnino for Zara Home will be available beginning September 26 through Zara Home and Zara online and at selected stores worldwide. In bringing together furniture, fashion, cinema and architecture, the collaboration ultimately feels less like a conventional home collection than an invitation into one of Guadagnino and Baisi’s carefully constructed worlds — only this time, the audience can take pieces of the set home.
Photographs | David Sims