Designer Ettore Sottsass
Ettore Sottsass was a pivotal Italian architect and industrial designer in late 20th century. Best known as the founder of the early 1980s Memphis collective, he designed furniture, buildings, glass, ceramics, jewelry, and industrial products. In 1981, his Memphis Group was heralded as the future of design.
“Functionalism is not enough.
Design should also be sensual and exciting.”
- Ettore Sottsass
Sottsass’s work has been the focus of a number of exhibitions, auctions and retrospectives:
• 1972 “The New Domestic Landscape”
Museum of Modern Art, New York 2006 “Ettore Sottsass” Museum of Art, Los Angeles
• 2007 “Ettore Sottsass — Work in Progress”
Design Museum, London 2016 “David Bowie/Collector” Sotheby’s, London
• 2017 “Ettore Sottsass, Design Radical”
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Significance of the Property
Ettore Sottsass is one of the most influential designers of the century and David Kelley has built the world's most celebrated design firm. But more than an ocean and a generation separates these two creative iconoclasts: Kelley is an unpretentious engineer from blue-collar Ohio who enjoys nothing more than a good tuna melt. Sottsass is the epitome of the Italian designer—mercurial, oracular, and slightly mischievous. Sottsass does not know what to make of Americans who eat fish out of cans (and then put cheese on it). Yet they remain the best of friends.
So Kelley, flush with the success of his design firm, IDEO, asked Sottsass to build him a house in the horsey foothills of Silicon Valley, and Sottsass agreed. What followed was an elaborate courtship as the 80-something Italian architect and the 50-something American client, each of whom casts a long shadow across twentieth-century design, circled and sparred, thrust and parried, and together created an extraordinary house.
The friendship between Kelley and Sottsass goes back a couple of decades, to the glory days of Siliconia when money was not the only thing on everyone’s minds and interesting people were naturally gravitating toward each other. Kelley had just founded what was then David Kelley Design and a mutual friend—Was it Steve Jobs? Was it Johnny Pigozzi?— suggested that he seek out the legendary architect who had just jolted Milan’s fashionable design world with the opening of Memphis...
David Kelley Discusses Sottsass's Design
(Click any image for a video tour of that feature)
About Ettore Sottsass
Outside Entry & Atrium
The Backyard
The Living Room
The Kitchen
The Office
The Master Bedroom
The Bedroom Suite
The Pool