MISHA @MDW2023 – NUOVA POMPEI COLLECTION BY VITO NESTA

Images courtsey of Misha

New collection @MDW2023: The Villa of Mysteries

For Milano Design Week 2023 Misha presents Nuova Pompei | The Villa of Mysteries: a spectacular setting to introduce the Nuova Pompei wallpaper collection designed by Vito Nesta.

The company is making its Fuorisalone debut with an immersive, kaleidoscopic staging, visitable from April 14 to 23, 2023 in Via Canova 7. Visitors will be carried away on a journey to discover one of the wonders of our country. After a trip along the Silk Road with previous collections dedicated to an oriental aesthetic and Chinoiserie decorations, with the new collection Misha is metaphorically coming home, to Italy, to the city of Pompei.

A passion for the exotic that has always inspired Misha’s creations looks beyond the ordinary. With the new collection, the brand flips the tendency to consider unusual what is far removed from our own culture, imagining Italy itself as exotic when viewed through the eyes of a foreigner. Pompeii comes back to life, with its frescoes and its iconic, captivating painted decorations.

The staging design, also the fruit of Vito Nesta’s creative vision, alternates elements that evoke ancient splendours – lavish banquets, plaster busts, Roman-inspired objects – with urban-industrial objects like scaffolding tubes, tarpaulins and construction site lights. In fact, the title ‘The Villa of Mysteries’ alludes to the ruins of an ancient Roman house found in the excavation of Pompeii.

The staging is an imaginary journey through epochs, a sort of time machine that allows viewers to experience the many lives of Pompeii. The journey is conceived as visual storytelling, a sequence of narrations that reveal, room after room, four wallcoverings: Architetture Grottesche, Paradiso, Mosaico and Sannita.

Presented by Som Santoso

Architetture Grottesche wallpaper, heralding the collection, covers the entrance hall; it recalls boiserie motifs, but more remote origins are hidden amid its designs. The scaffolding tubes delineating the walls of the location are an ideal support for the exposition, playing with volumes and constructing an architecture with the architecture.

Continuing along the itinerary, stagings of rooms from typical Pompeiian houses unfold like a grand performance, telling of customs and moments from everyday life in that ancient epoch.

In the first room, Architetture Grottesche is the backdrop for a sumptuous table set with goblets, busts and antique vases as if to simulate an opulent banquet, reconstructing a space of conviviality and socialising.

The second room introduces Paradiso wallpaper: plants, fruit and birds in flight cover the walls, together with lush greenery. A narrow-leaved tree, a chair and a chaise-longue – contemporary, sinuous, organic shapes – evoke an inviting air of otium.

The last two rooms give visitors an opportunity to see the company’s expertise up close. Misha’s capacity to cover the surfaces of any room and talent for creating custom spaces and products shine through in the bathroom, completely covered in Mosaico, an extraordinarily versatile and refined pattern.

At the end of the staging, we find an actual workshop that focuses on the highly artisanal component of Misha’s products. In a neutral space, for the entire duration of the exposition, embroiderers and painters decorate and embellish the collection’s Sannita wallpaper, transforming it into a painted and hand-stitched work of art.

The Nuova Pompei Collection
The Nuova Pompei wallpaper collection offers a modern, dynamic reinterpretation, interweaving the city’s history with an eye towards the future. Four different patterns that share the same eloquent use of contemporary, captivating colours: Architetture Grottesche, Paradiso, Mosaico and Sannita.

Architetture Grottesche, heralding the collection’s arrival, has its roots in “grotesques,” a particular type of painted decoration from Rome’s Augustan age, which was itself inspired by Pompeiian style. These ancient decorations are reinterpreted by Vito Nesta; maintaining their customary harmony and spatial arrangement, he has imagined and drawn on paper a dreamlike setting. The design is made up of delicate, metaphysical architectural elements against a monochromatic ground, embellished and shimmering with an assortment of jewels, colourful gems and minute details.

Paradiso evokes a dreamy atmosphere and the ancient desire to be surrounded by lush nature in the private spaces of the home dedicated to night-time repose. Vito Nesta, inspired by the frescoes in the House of the Orchard, where “garden painting” embellished the walls of the bedrooms, conceived an ornamental design in which nature proliferates and flourishes. The wallpaper depicts birds in flight and citrus, pomegranate and other fruit trees in the foreground, amid which ancient ruins can be glimpsed, in a continuous dialogue between indoors and outdoors.

The striking Mosaico wallpaper is a contemporary interpretation of flooring from Ancient Pompeii: true mosaic squares created using the Greek “carpet” technique. These decorations, once used for flooring, have now been designed to be applied to walls and ceilings, altering the observer’s point of view.

The Mosaico wallpaper, with its innovative, contemporary design, is can be composed to suit spaces and personal preferences, thanks to Misha’s artisanal skill. The geometric, modular pattern of subtle, elegant lines is thus a truly distinctive and innovative product.

The textural, touchable Sannita wallpaper pays homage to the painting techniques of the first Pompeiian style found in private homes as well as public buildings. Vito Nesta works with Pompeiian history in a new way, translating the textural quality of stone onto paper. The wallpaper combines the orderly geometries of rectangles and squares with the veining of marble and onyx through the use of interchangeable modules.

Sannita wallpaper alternates solids and voids and colours that heighten the textured areas, along with gold, silver and copper veining that make it a truly unique and exquisite product.