Living With Masterpieces

The Art Collection at Villa Porto Felice

Table of Contents

Tags: Art

Table of Contents

The Villa Porto Felice art collection does not announce itself. It begins the moment you walk through a room and realise the chair you are about to sit in is a Mies van der Rohe.

Sophie Rossetti has spent two decades assembling a living gallery of twentieth-century American and Italian design, where guests sleep, eat and spend their mornings surrounded by works by Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and sculptor Bijan Bassiri. Most collections keep their distance. Glass cases, velvet ropes, the understood rule that looking is permitted but touching is not. Rossetti built Porto Felice on the opposite principle: that art is only alive when it is lived with.

The Philosophy

Art as Architecture

The interior of Villa Porto Felice spans American and Italian works from the 1950s to the 2000s, described by its designer as “evergreen” — a collection chosen not for trend or investment value, but for staying power. The pieces by Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe were not acquired to impress. They were acquired to be used.

Furniture by Cassina, Vitra and Moroso fills the living spaces. Many of these pieces were crafted in Brianza, the design district that sits between Lake Como and Milan, where twentieth-century Italian design found its form. To sit on them here, with the lake framed in the windows beyond, is to understand why they were made.

Sculpture in Unexpected Places

Bijan Bassiri’s sculptures interrupt the villa at intervals. A regular presence at the Venice Biennale, Bassiri did not create work for galleries. His pieces appear at the end of a corridor, beside a window, in rooms where guests pass through rather than pause.

That is the point. Rossetti’s belief, evident in every curatorial decision, is that art positioned where you cannot ignore it becomes part of how a place feels, not just how it looks.

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The Experience

What a Guest Actually Encounters

The effect of this approach is difficult to describe without experiencing it, but something close to it can be mapped:

Space	What Awaits You
The living room	Works by Mies van der Rohe, Eames, and Frank Lloyd Wright alongside floor-to-ceiling lake views
Throughout the villa	Bassiri sculptures positioned in passage, not display
Corridors and quiet corners	Pieces by Cassina, Vitra, and Moroso from Brianza’s workshops
The library	Curated volumes alongside sculptural lamps and design objects

None of it is labelled. There are no information cards. Guests who want to know more ask, and the staff answer. Guests who simply want to sit in a beautiful chair and look at the lake are equally welcome to do exactly that.

The Design Experience

For guests whose curiosity runs deeper, the villa offers a curated journey into Brianza itself — the workshops and showrooms where many of Porto Felice’s iconic pieces were made. It is a rare opportunity: to see the hands and places behind the objects, and to return to the villa afterwards with a different understanding of what surrounds you.

That understanding changes the villa on the way back. The chair by the window is no longer just a chair.

The collection at Villa Porto Felice does not ask to be admired. It simply exists alongside you — in the living room where morning light crosses a Frank Lloyd Wright piece, in the corridor where a Bassiri sculpture stops you mid-step — doing what Rossetti always intended: turning the act of staying somewhere into something you carry home.