In His Native Venice, Donghia CEO Andrea Rubelli and His Family Practice the Art of Living in an Ancient Palazzo Near the Grand Canal
WHEN YOU DESCEND FROM A FAMILY WHOSE NAME
HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED WITH LUXURY VENETIAN SILKS, VELVETS, AND DAMASKS FOR FIVE
GENERATIONS, where else would you live but in one of the exotic floating
city’s most venerable palazzi? And so it is with Andrea Rubelli, who resides
with his wife, Sandrina, and their son, Leonardo, in a building near the Grand
Canal that was old before Columbus arrived in the Americas.
“The style is early Gothic,” says Andrea,
who runs the historic Rubelli firm
alongside his father, Alessandro, and one of his two brothers, Nicolò Rubelli.
“Our architect estimates that it was built in the 14th century, probably around
1370.” Even more remarkable is that many of the home’s architectural
elements—from the façade, with its galleries of arched windows, to the ceiling
beams and terrazzo floors—are original.
The Rubellis’ palazzo has been in the
family since great-great-grandfather Lorenzo inherited it from his second wife.
The Rubelli home, like the company he runs, Andrea says, weaves “the warp of tradition
with the weft of innovation,” especially since Rubelli acquired Donghia, the
American furniture, textile, and lighting company, in 2005.
Predictably enough, the 650-year-old
building has undergone some changes over the years, many of them after a fire
claimed its top floor in the 1950s. Since the 1990s, the upper two levels have
been transformed during a series of three renovations into two duplex
apartments. Andrea, Sandrina, and Leonardo live in one, and Andrea’s sister,
Matilde, and her family live in the other.
While renovating is often a challenge even in the average Manhattan co-op, nothing matches a remodel in a building that was purposely built “off plumb” by medieval architects who understood that a structure standing on wooden stilts in water needed to be flexible to survive. “A room in a Venetian palazzo can be ten inches off from one side to another,” says Andrea, “which means you don’t even bother to take measurements—they can change between the time you take them and when you are ready to do the work. Everything has to be custom in a Venetian renovation, and everything has to be made on site.”
Despite the many recent revisions, the
palazzo retains its original, and typical, comportment of rooms. An arrival
hall lies on the ground, or water level, replete with original 14th-century
pavers. It’s home to a “new” staircase, which in Venetian terms “means that it
dates from the Renaissance,” Sandrina says. This entryway also doubles as the
home to the family’s lagoon craft: Andrea’s pride and joy, a custom-built
racing puparin and a smaller mascareta.
Immediately above is the floor known as the piano nobile, or “noble floor” in English. “In the old days,” explains Sandrina, who comes from Quercianella, a small seaside town south of Pisa, “these palazzi were used for business as well as residences. Traders would bring their wares into the entry hall, and if the merchant owner of the home was impressed, he would invite the trader upstairs into the public reception rooms.” The 21st-century Rubellis use the so-called state apartments in the palazzo for business, charity, and personal events—including their own wedding reception.
Above the formal piano nobile are two
floors of private apartments and a roof deck with views of the bell tower of
the 600-year-old Santo Stefano church. It also offers a glimpse of La Fenice
opera house, for which the Rubelli firm provided the wall fabrics both for the
1837 reconstruction and the restoration that followed the devastating 1996
fire. (The Rubelli textile archive, housed in another Renaissance Venetian
landmark, the Palazzo Corner Spinelli, is open to the public by appointment.)
“When we were decorating our home,” says
Sandrina, “we kept to certain themes. One, of course, is the sea. And another
is the great cultural life that the city has known throughout its history.
Also, I love books, so I put bookshelves in every room. At the entry to the
private apartments, there’s even a closet with bookshelf-print paper by
Brunschwig & Fils. It was a wedding gift from my brother-in-law Nicolò.”
The Rubellis furnished the palazzo with
family antiques dating back centuries, as well as an art collection that ranges
from the Renaissance to the 20th century. A key piece is an odd little chair
that sits at the foot of the stairs to the family’s private quarters. “I found
it on a trip to Portugal,” says Sandrina. “We were traveling between Lisbon and
Sintra, and I had to stop and go for a walk in the woods to see where Lord
Byron used to ride his horses. And right in the middle of the woods was an
antiques shop with this curious little chair. It is a cello player’s chair from
the 1700s, and when the dealer acquired it, it had been covered in a Rubelli
fabric. I took it home on the plane as carry-on luggage because I wasn’t about
to let it out of my sight.”
Most of the fabrics in the palazzo are by
Rubelli, and a few others by Donghia, like the
deep-magenta striped draperies in the piano nobile sitting room. The
“tablecloth” in that room is a section of the stage curtain Rubelli made for
the restoration of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Made of silk and 24-karat
gold thread, the entire finished curtain weighed some 30 tons.
Donghia fabric makes its appearance on the
chairs in the red dining library, as the Rubellis call it. “It was supposed to
be a straightforward dining room, but I couldn’t resist making it into a
dual-purpose space,” says Sandrina. Both the chairs and the Donghia table were
once in the Rubellis’ Manhattan apartment, but the table reminded Sandrina of
the hull of a boat, so off to Venice it was shipped.
The native Italians actually met in New
York City. Sandrina was on her way to a party on the top floor of a building
and found herself stuck between floors in a tiny elevator with another woman.
After 45 minutes trapped together—a nightmare for the claustrophobic
Sandrina—the woman, who turned out to be the wife of Andrea’s best friend,
said, “I have to introduce you to a friend of my husband.” The rest is
Tuscan/Venetian amore.
Much of the decor, in fact, was chosen
with a “Tuscany meets Venice” marriage in mind. The tablecloth on the roof
terrace is “a typical linen from Tuscany,” says Sandrina, and the terra-cotta
planters are Tuscan, too. “They’ve been making them in the same factory since
the time of the Medicis,” adds Andrea.
“When I was deciding on colors,” says
Sandrina, “I was thinking of the green of olive oil and the gold of the
sunset.” Those colors are realized throughout the palazzo in rich Rubelli
fabrics, like the gold silk on the walls, designed by Giò Ponti in the 1930s.
“It’s amazing, as you start to open up
floors and walls, what you can see and learn about life in Venice over the
centuries,” says Andrea, who did the upholstery in all the rooms. That means
the water, too, and there’s no doubt that his prized possession is his
custom-built mahogany puparin. “It’s not a gondola, as some people might
think,” he instructs, “but another kind of Venetian boat. If a gondola is a
Rolls-Royce, then the puparin is a Ferrari. It’s built for speed. I took the
dimensions of the room, the front door, and the little plaza in front of the
building and said to the designer [Venetian rowing champion Franco Crea], “Just
make it fit.”
Sandrina’s favorite piece is the 18th-century
secretary in the reading room. “It’s Tuscan,” she explains, “from Livorno, but
inside the top of the desk is a model of a very Venetian Palladian house. It
symbolizes our relationship and what I have tried to make our home into, a
combination of my Tuscan roots and the Venice I have come to think of as my
adopted home.”
“Interestingly,” Andrea points out, “the
name of our palazzo is Pisani Rubelli. Pisani was a Venetian family who built
our home, plus many other palazzi in Venice. They were originally from Pisa.
It’s such a coincidence that Sandrina, who grew up near Pisa, came to live in
it.”
“I am a lot more Venetian since coming to
live here,” Sandrina confirms. “And,” her husband responds, “I am a lot more
Tuscan.”
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