Italian interior designer Mirta Ottaviani is all for bringing a home into the present, but not at the cost of undoing its past, especially if said past includes framed vintage Vogue covers and a floor of entirely pink Portuguese marble. “Those are honestly the first things I noticed,” says Mirta of the 753-square-foot 1960s apartment in Rome’s Farnesina district she was recently entrusted to redesign, admitting, “I just couldn’t take my eyes off them.” As she later learned, she didn’t need to. The magazine covers had belonged to the owner’s late mother, as had the home itself. And the owner, an Athens-based banker and a childhood friend of Mirta’s mother, was more than happy to keep them around. What she wasn’t as happy to retain was everything else. To wit: peeling walls, tired furniture, and a spirit in dire need of resuscitating. And even though the lived life of the flat left much to be desired, for Mirta, it was inspiration central.
What started off as a restyling project soon evolved into a soup-to-nuts remodel spanning the entrance, living room, kitchen, and two bathrooms. “Not one room was spared,” jokes Mirta, although by “spared,” what she really means is overlooked. Since she wanted to preserve the elegance and femininity of the space, she was careful about what came in and what went out. “I wanted the flat to have an old-fashioned, vintage look,” she avers. “Nothing too shiny or new.” And so, she recovered the pink diamond-patterned Portuguese marble flooring in the living room, she repolished the walnut parquet in the bedroom, and where the old floor had been removed in the bathrooms, she added a new pink marble that looks like it could have been there from the start.
