Paolo Ferrari:
the creative origins of his designs

By Jay Merrick

In an era of rampant production and consumption, the most obvious way to introduce a design practice is to highlight its degree of success. In the case of Studio Paolo Ferrari, the simplest statement of that sort would be that, since its foundation in 2016, the practice has quadrupled in size and is now designing and delivering major interior design commissions for blue-chip developers and architects in North America, the Middle East, Asia and Europe. 

But this text is not achievement-related. It dwells, instead, on the fundamental influences and ideas that actually produce Paolo Ferrari’s designs. And so the more interesting simple statement is that at the core of Paolo Ferrari’s design creativity is his profound interest in art, architecture and cinema, and even the 18th century statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke’s idea of the sublime – scenes that trigger a sense of awe which cannot be measured or imitated. 

How do these ingredients segue into the spaces, materials and furniture that Ferrari designs – and what are the effects and experiences they produce? One fundamental design outcome is immediately obvious: his interiors are never superficially ‘arty’ or over-elaborate. There are no endlessly reiterated design moves, no ‘house style’, no trivially dramatic features. 

His quest for interiors with sublime qualities – moments of wonder or surprise – is balanced by an equal interest in minimalism, and not least the famous dictum of one of the early godfathers of modernist architecture, Mies van der Rohe: less is more. Ferrari’s designs express that potency phrase in ways that are highly individual, aesthetically and spatially. 

The tension between paring-down and developing more expressive forms, spaces and materials is a kind of reactor core that illuminates the practice’s intensely detail-conscious design process which, in addition to their developer clients, has involved collaborations with architects such as Frank Gehry, Foster + Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects. 

The designs are tied to a particular ethos: each project is treated as a singularity, an opportunity to re-explore and reinvent design ideas without any reference to transient design trends or the post-millennial maelstrom of ephemeral imagery, which the great contemporary Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas calls ‘the violent surf of information’. 

Ferrari’s design odyssey began in his childhood: ‘When I was young I used to attend church with my family, and I would daydream about the spaces in the church – that feeling of monumentality and ritual and strange objects. And then I would always be thinking: how would I reinvent this space or that space? This way of thinking was imprinted on me very early on.’ It is equally significant that his father was a cabinetmaker, and that one family friend was a meticulous leather seamstress. Ferrari’s almost daily observations of their skills was the origin of his obsession with materials, and the craft of making and fine details. 

His professional creativity was shaped at Toronto’s OCAD University, Canada’s preeminent and longest established art and design school. The key factor there was the intermingling of art and architecture with interior design. ‘I liked the diversity of the courses, the range of ideas,’ Ferrari explains, ‘and the way we learned to develop designs, always starting with a concept.’ 

He found the work of architects such as Koolhaas, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and the mid-century modernist master Alvar Aalto particularly stimulating: ‘Koolhaas’s early projects were so out-of-the-box and seemed to be somewhere between art and sculpture. With Herzog and de Meuron it was the range of their work – so creative, you never knew what was coming. And Aalto, that relationship between small design details and larger features and spaces.’ 

Artists also made an important early mark on Ferrari, and they include Donald Judd, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Irwin, Gerhard Richter and Carl Andre. And, as with the architects who first caught his attention, these artists produced a similar mixture of minimalism, diversity of materials and, sometimes, very unexpected forms. 

These influences heightened Ferrari’s awareness to the way the manipulation and shaping of spaces, and how they relate to each other functionally and aesthetically, determines how they are experienced: ‘Ultimately, I think it’s about simplifying things to their essence. But interior design is also about finding ways to celebrate human existence and human rituals – that’s where I landed early on in my thinking.’ 

His deep interest in the designs and plotting of films is equally significant: ‘I often think of the remark by the great Italian director Frederico Fellini, about being seduced and enchanted by a story. He said that scenes and settings should have a kind of hypnotic quality, and should never be trivialised by a sensational visual hook. 

‘I design interiors to tell you a story, as if spaces and scenes are chapters in a story. I also think of Stanley Kubrik, whose sets created not just scenes, but complete and highly individual worlds.’ 

The Kubrik effect is certainly seen in the award-winning project that first put Paolo Ferrari on the international design world’s radar. The subterranean nightclub at the Five Palm Jumeirah Hotel in Dubai, which he created in 2018, possesses a luscious fluidity of line, materials and lighting – a completely resolved and highly atmospheric composition of objects, perspectives and space. 

‘Designing the nightclub shook my ideas up a bit,’ says Ferrari. ‘It’s not the kind of interior I would necessarily design now, but it broke me out of my earlier minimalist design thinking. It opened up the possibility of designing more complex spaces that had a theatrical quality.’ 

Nevertheless, the design of the nightclub epitomises his fascination with sublime moments which, he says, ‘live somewhere between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the established and the new. In interiors and architecture too much of either can seem uninspiringly derivative, or alien.’ 

One key outcome of Ferrari’s filmic interests is an obsession with how views through spaces, or their connections with exteriors, are framed: ‘Framing is a big part of architecture and interiors. For me, it’s about designing and sequencing a journey and establishing particular sight-lines. 

Ferrari thinks about designing interiors as if he were framing scenes in a film, ‘a series of changing perspectives as you move through them. The change from a quiet cerebral atmosphere to more energetic ones, for example. And creating moments of wonder that have the effect of pulling you through the spaces.’ 

We can see this framing-cum-narration at work in interiors such as those designed for the architect Frank Gehry’s forthcoming Forma tower in Toronto. And in this respect, Ferrari is following the spatial lead of great architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Adolf Loos; the latter’s Villa Mu ller in Prague contains extraordinary raumplan interiors that are experienced like a continuous multi-storey tracking-shot through the building. 

These ideas are implicit in Ferrari’s process of answering clients’ design briefs: ‘Our approach is process-driven, and understanding the client is key. Designs begin with decisions about which three or four materials we’re going to use, and exploring simple gestures in terms of how interiors might look.’ 

Although the design of each interiors project is absolutely unique in the way the interior architecture and materials are composed, he does aim to produce particular characteristics. ‘Interiors have to have the feel of a journey,’ he says, ‘expressing the essence of materials, not afraid of unusual forms or details – an entire human world in which materials and volumes of space are in balance. The materials I use are sometimes unusual, but I don’t present them in an overdramatic way because, if I did, they would lose their natural resonance and potency – their human and emotional qualities.’ 

A good example of these characteristics can be seen in the interiors he designed for the forthcoming Desert Rock Resort in Saudi Arabia. Here, the colour-tones and textures of the surfaces, fabrics, and furniture and fittings are directly related to the landscape. So, too, are special features such as the sand-cast bronze light fixtures and detailing. 

‘The bronze pieces are contemporary in design, but made using the ancient sand-casting process,’ explains Ferrari. ‘So even these elements speak of the site and the landscape in a beautiful, historic and tactile way. They are a great symbol of what we want to do in all our projects.’ 

Perhaps the most striking example of Ferrari’s interior design as a completely composed world is his creation of interiors for Alchemy, a wellness-related cannabis retailer in Toronto. ‘Materiality was key to this project,’ he explains. ‘The elements of the design were metaphors for the products, but in a way that created an atmosphere of wellness – breaking the historic stigma of cannabis by finding a completely different way to present the products. It’s a reinvention of one way we can experience the duality of science and nature. 

The materials used included deliberately irregular hand-made terracotta tiles – ‘a touch of Japanese wabi-sabi’ – plus raw brushed aluminium, and vivid vermillion folds of biodegradable resin: ‘The juxtapositions give each material and colour an extra potency. I think of Alchemy as our very modest Barcelona Pavilion moment.’ He is referring to the building designed by Mies van der Rohe, whose novel arrangement of planes and use of beautiful materials such as onyx, travertine and Verde Tinos marble still seem utterly radical almost a century after it was built (and rebuilt in 1986). 

Paolo Ferrari speaks of ‘timelessness and courageous innovation, capturing the zeitgeist, living on the edge of creativity’. His designs do capture and express certain aspects of the 21st century’s zeitgeist, but its the edge of creativity that he’s really interested in – designs that cannot, a la Edmund Burke’s idea of the sublime, be precisely measured or imitated, yet ultimately seek to produce meaningful and engrossing human reactions to the spaces and environments around them.