In the late 1950s, an insurance agent from a town just north of Milan set out to fulfil his latent architectural fantasies. It was a period when Italian design was reaching the apex of its creative potential. Gio Ponti was splashing his and his contemporaries’ utopian manifestos across the pages of Domus. The same cohort was rebuilding entire neighbourhoods following the war according to those elaborate ideas. Carlo Tremolada had no training in the field, but what he did have was stubborn vision. On a grassy estate in Erba, not far from Lake Como, he imagined a modern palace, furnished with all the contemporary conveniences but designed in a style entirely his own. From the front, the home resembles an A-frame cabin held aloft by square granite pillars. From the side, the steeply pitched roof — tiled with neat, slate-grey river stones — looks more like a modern riff on a French countryside cottage, the dramatic overhang almost engulfing the ground-floor windows.
It took him several years and all of his money, but in 1959 the home was finished. ‘Unfortunately, not long after it was ready, he had a stroke,’ says his grandson, also named Carlo Tremolada, a reconstructive surgeon based in Milan. ‘So he was never really able to enjoy it.’ Carlo’s parents took up residence in the home following his grandfather’s death, but very little was altered over the years. ‘My grandfather loved that house,’ he recounts. ‘He took a lot of time in building it — he wanted it to be completely unique. Every tree in the garden was chosen like it was his child. Each little stone on the roof was put in the way he wanted it to be. If you look at the swimming pool, he painted the bottom to make it look like a riverbed.’
While the home’s design can be entirely attributed to the elder Tremolada, it’s not strictly true that he didn’t have any help. According to Carlo, his grandfather was close friends with the celebrated Milanese architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni (WoI Feb 2024), one of the towering figures of mid-century Italian design. Apparently, he often turned to Caccia Dominioni for advice. It’s not clear how large or small of a role he played, but his influence on the house is certainly visible. Perhaps he found inspiration for the intricate mosaic flooring in Caccia Dominioni’s Galleria Strasbourg project, whose lobby floor resembles a swirling dance of shooting stars. Or maybe he introduced him to the woodworkers in nearby Brianza, northern Italy’s longtime centre for furniture production. Only a master of his trade would have been able to fashion the central stairway’s magnificent curving handrail — complete with elegantly carved balusters that look like braided locks of hair.
But, like many of this idiosyncratic building’s secrets, we’ll never know. All the same, it’s captivating to picture Mr Tremolada on his tireless quest to furnish his private palace. ‘My grandfather was very passionate about furniture. He would look everywhere for the right pieces,’ says Carlo. ‘He was a maniac about details.’
One thing that becomes clear is that he loved art and furniture from the 17th and 18th centuries. His Baroque credenzas with elaborate inlay and heavy gilded mirrors are testaments to this. The carved doorways that separate the living and dining rooms, for instance, look as though they were taken straight from an ageing Renaissance palazzo. One imagines a crumbling manse somewhere in the Lombardian hinterlands, vines creeping through the shattered windows and dust gathering on the floor, the doorways surgically removed and transported to the suburbs of Como.
He was equally single-minded when it came to his taste in art, enamoured with landscapes and still lifes from centuries past. According to Carlo, the Antoine Caron oil painting depicting the murder of the innocents in Florence, which hangs above a floral sofa in the living room, could rival a similar one on show at the Louvre. There are a few modern exceptions, too, including a pasted-toned pair of Raoul Dufy landscapes that live above the guest room’s daybed. However, the collection that hangs in the home today has been whittled down to a fraction of the original, many of them having been sold decades ago to finance the upkeep of the sprawling estate.
Tremolada’s Erba house paints a picture of a singular man, dogged with point of view, yet in possession of a discerning eye and an expansive portfolio of interests. And though it’s fun to imagine the place as a triumph of individualism that generations later is still evoking wonder and curiosity, in reality it was always intended to be a family home, the passion intended to be passed on. ‘The love he had for this house,’ says Carlo, ‘can still be felt when you stay there.’
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