Casa Mollino, Turin: the secret flat where no one ever lived

Via Napione, on the banks of the Po. Behind an ordinary Turinese façade hides Carlo Mollino's most intimate work: a flat he composed room by room over eight years, from 1960 to 1968 — and where he never slept.

A metaphysical bachelor pad

Mollino — architect, photographer, pilot, designer of the most expensive tables on the market — conceived the Casa Mollino the way the Egyptians prepared their tombs: a place for the afterlife, saturated with symbols. A boat-shaped bed, leopards, framed butterflies, velvet curtains: every object is a sign, arranged once and for all.

What you see there

The bentwood armchair and chairs of his own design, the mirrors that multiply the space, the bathroom with its ocean-liner portholes — and that constant tension between an engineer's rigour and surrealist eroticism that makes up the Mollino signature. His bentwood oak tables now exceed a million euros at public auction; the flat, meanwhile, shows where it all came from.

Visiting

The casa can be visited by appointment only, in small groups, guided by the keepers who saved it in the 1990s. An hour out of time, ten minutes from the centre of Turin.

Spotted a piece in the Mollino taste? Scan it on Beyit to place the period and the value.