Carlo de Carli’s Casa Galli

If there is one designer in the postwar era, who had put the creation of a relationship between human form and design and the integration of space, material, and the human body at the forefront of his agenda, it was Italian designer/writer/educator Carlo di Carli (1910-1999). Upon graduating from the Polytechnic University of Milan in 1934, he immediately started working at the office of Giò Ponti, a giant designer-architect who was considered at the time the Dean of modern Italian design. His years with Ponti had come to shape young Carlo de Carli’s language and approach, and the influence could have been more apparent than in the stylish interior that he created for Casa Galli in Milan, which he completed in 1949 and which contents are offered in the design sale this week at Christie’s London. The sense of intimacy and the warmth that the interior of the three spaces project are the testimony to the sensitivity to the lives of the home’s inhabitants. Just before creating the interior for Casa Galli, di Carli outlined his vision for modern design, announced that that “a chair, an armchair or a table must be elements in which one can feel an individual presence.”