The Furniture of Carlo Mollino by Fulvio Ferrari

That it was filled with bizarre curiosities and his now-signature erotic photos (which he also kept shrouded during his lifetime). It’s believed among the Turinese that the home is the perfect embodiment of his genius, eccentric brain. The two-story villa, which sits on the edge of Turin’s River Po, was intricately designed by Mollino as a shrine to his favorite objects. ( Carol Rama, for instance, a late Turinese artist and dear friend of Mollino, didn’t even know the abode existed-and she lived just around the corner.) Since arriving in Turin, I’d heard whisperings of Mollino and his hidden home, resurrected in 1999 as a museum by two members of his small but ardent cult following-an Italian design expert named Fulvio Ferrari and his son Napoleone. I’ll admit that I was among the uninitiated, at least until I made a trip to Turin last month and spent an afternoon at Casa Mollino, one of the polymath’s several secret apartments that he kept hidden from his friends and acquaintances. And through that process, his legacy is only just becoming known to even some of the most art- and design-obsessed among us.

But he was also, despite his many achievements, a mysterious hermit whose motivations are still being pieced together now, over 40 years after his death. He was a wunderkind engineer, a trailblazing architect, an intrepid photographer of the surreal and the erotic, an award-winning race-car designer, a decorated stunt pilot and downhill skier, and a passionate occultist. Carlo Mollino was a man with as many talents as secrets.

The Furniture of Carlo Mollino by Fulvio Ferrari