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Architect Romeo, your professional career combines architectural design and interior design. What is your vision of luxury living, and what elements do you consider essential today for creating a high-end residence?
My vision of living is founded on a profound principle, one that matured during my years of training with my mentor, Professor Paolo Portoghesi: living is a poetic act. For me, true luxury never lies in the ostentatious display of expensive objects isolated in a void—like small monuments that are “foreign” to the place that hosts them—nor in the cold minimalism of a “tabula rasa” approach that erases history. I reject the solipsistic isolation of interiors disconnected from what already exists.
Creating a high-end residence today means bringing to life a space that “happens”, a living organism governed by a pulsating geometry. The essential element is the ability to design the “space between things”, placing memory at the source of poetry. The plan of an exceptional residence should reveal the interaction of strongly symbolic figures: the square (the earth, the world in its vital points) and the circle (the sky, the sphere of the divine). In my approach, this geometric dialogue evokes the great theme of squaring the circle, placing the human being at the emotional centre of the designed universe. Furnishings must become a point of resonance that welcomes the individual as part of a whole: not a fragment of the cosmos placed upon the earth, but a piece of earth that becomes cosmos.
Becoming part of Luxforsale as a Professional Partner represents an important choice. What values have you found in the network, and what opportunities do you believe it can offer clients who wish to purchase, enhance or renovate a prestigious property?
In Luxforsale, I recognised the same profound rejection of standardisation and cultural amnesia that guides my own work. In a real estate market often dominated by standardised solutions and cold, measurable processes, Luxforsale has the great merit of knowing how to listen to the genius loci and enhance the uniqueness and soul of exclusive properties.
This partnership offers clients and investors a rare strategic opportunity: the certainty of engaging with an excellence-driven network capable of approaching a prestigious property as a “grateful heir.” Those wishing to purchase or enhance an exclusive residence will find in my studio a consultant capable of listening to the building, both in its physical space and in its mnemonic dimension.
I had the great privilege of working alongside Professor Portoghesi during the conception and construction of the Mosque of Rome, the redevelopment of the Hotel Minerva, Palazzo Corrodi, and the design of the historic Sarteur store at 265 Via del Corso—an architectural work that today also lives on in the silence of my memory.
I carry in my heart his words on the genesis of a project, when he explained that a building is born shaped by the interference of the magnetic fields of its territory, and that the architect’s dream is to “play the role of a matchmaker, a catalyst: like certain insects that carry pollen from flower to flower, allowing different plants, far apart from one another, to produce a single fruit.”
In my studio, we apply this philosophy to property enhancement, moving “in search of lost connections” in order to build a dialogue between the history of a building and contemporary civilisation. This translates into an authorial consultancy that not only safeguards the investment over time, but also enhances its desirability and value within the luxury market.
The luxury property market is increasingly oriented towards customised, sustainable and technologically advanced solutions. What requests do you receive most frequently from your clients, and what trends are shaping high-end projects?
The most frequent request stems from a subtle sense of disorientation experienced by contemporary clients, caught between the coldness of hyper-technological home automation and an intimate desire for authentic domestic warmth.
The true high-end trend is a science of complexity capable of generating sensory well-being, in which colour plays a role in profound reconnection, weaving space together with nature and the history of the landscape. We are witnessing a clear departure from the abstraction and rigid code of Modernism: clients are seeking a chromatic dialogue with the shades of earth, ochre and the brickwork of Roman tradition—as in the Rinascimento Primo complex—or with the textures and greens of the glazed ceramics of the Mosque, capable of reflecting light and transforming it into vibrant matter.
Today, the trend is towards the search for fluid spatiality that pursues a process of de-materialisation, in which light takes precedence over raw matter. In Modernism, the window is an explicit cut—the fenêtre en longueur; in my high-end projects, light is a mystery revealed through reflection.
Concealing the origin of the light source allows light to become atmosphere, permeating the space and suggesting a sense of aerial suspension, much like the forest of tree-like columns and perpetually moving water that orchestrate the Mosque.
The most advanced technology is integrated invisibly, serving this sensory, intimate and empathetic design, guided by the principles of Geophilosophy and its ethical imperative. It is a counterattack of narrative against image, of ethics against aesthetics, understood as a project of Becoming rather than Being, guided by listening as an interrogation of thought.
As Caterina Resta writes so beautifully: “A way of living always rooted in a singular here-and-now, therefore always in a specific time, but also in a specific space, allows each existence to take place, each time, in a given language, within which stone, plant, animal and the physical landscape as a whole do not merely serve as a backdrop, but become the essential and constitutive elements of a shared world.”
Looking to the future, what objectives do you set for yourself as a Luxforsale Official Partner, and what message would you like to convey to owners and buyers seeking a professional capable of transforming an exclusive property into a unique, bespoke home?
My objective is to demonstrate that high-end interior design is the noble instrument through which the poetry hidden within every space can be released, allowing the pollen of the past to fertilise the modern project, at any scale.
Throughout my career as a designer, every gesture—from the macro-scale of a structure to the micro-scale of designing a handle for Venini or creating a personal sketch for the design of a bridal atelier—is an act of faith in architecture as an instrument of ecstasy and revelation. Looking back at the sketch for the latter, I remember how the column ceased to be a static element and became a tree, transforming that commercial space into a “symbolic forest.”
I carry with me the ability to unite the rigour of symmetry with the freedom of the curve, the memory of the Baroque with biological complexity. My thoughts return to Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel: a masterpiece capable of transforming marble into vibrant flesh and revealing its spirit, an image that I cultivate every day.
Working alongside Professor Portoghesi taught me that inhabiting the earth means caring for it, cultivating it, and cultivating oneself within it, while at the same time nurturing its profoundly symbolic and spiritual character.
We are not called merely to be technicians of construction, but custodians of a memory that pulses. Like the Ammonite, which preserves within its fossil the secret of infinite growth, the Master’s teaching continues to generate centres of radiance within each of us.
To owners seeking excellence, I would like to remind them that only those with deep roots in memory can project themselves boldly into the future, embracing the value of living symbols and demonstrating that it is still possible, always and forever, to live poetically.
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