Valentino died yesterday, and by the time you read this, you will have heard hundreds of times that he gave the world Valentino red, that he dressed queens and actresses, and the intimate moment between him and Karl Lagerfeld where Karl tells him “compared to us, the rest are making rags.” These are facts. But these facts just make him sound like someone who existed only on runways and red carpets, when the purest expression of his taste was indoors.
Valentino once said there were only three things he could do well: make a dress, decorate a house, and entertain people. While being charming, he was also making it very clear what mattered most to him and where he saw his domains. For him, interior design wasn’t just a hobby or the vain indulgence of someone who is filthy rich. It was a discipline as serious to him as couture, and possibly more revealing because it was for him where his fashion creations were for others.
Valentino Believed Interiors Were as Serious as Couture
Like different eras in his design history, Valentino owned several homes across Rome, Paris, London, New York, Gstaad, and Capri. Each residence was designed as a juxtaposition between its setting, its history, and the individual signature that he believed it needed. In none of the homes did he impose a single look so much as he demanded a single standard expressed across every room: grandeur, excellence, and integrity. While yes, he worked with Renzo Mongiardino, Henri Samuel, Peter Marino, some of the best interior designers in the world, he was never a set-and-forget-it client from the stories. The interior designers executed the moods, but it was Valentino who edited.
A Single Standard Across Every Home
The Appian Way villa in Rome
Theatrical but livable, the Mongiardino-designed villa was consumed by classical references, layered antiques, and rich textiles, but you wouldn’t look at it and call it “chaos.” The villa is considered maximalist but framed by the myriad of historical references and features from different cultures across Europe and Asia.
Château de Wideville
Valentino indulged in a lifelong fascination with collecting different antique pieces, including Chinese art. This became a folding motif he unfolded into the nineteenth-century French Chateau. Floral wallpapers, porcelains, and a staircase he described as “quite harmonious.” It is an important word. Harmony never seemed accidental for him. It was achieved through insistence on balance, on proportion, on knowing when to stop.
How His Interiors Explained His Fashion
This establishes the bridge between how he designed interiors and the same philosophy expressed through clothes. Valentino’s fashion was just like his interiors: classical, definitive pieces, strong structures, grandeur held in check. He didn’t dress women to shock as much as he dressed women to steady themselves. He understood that confidence is a kind of shelter, and he built it sometimes in silk, and sometimes in stone.
With the flood of stories coming in the wake of his death, I can’t help but notice how coherent his worldview was. It didn’t matter if it was for fashion or interiors, he believed elegance was not excess, being glamorous meant being disciplined, and that living well was not about accumulating more but knowing who you are.
It’s tempting to dismiss Valentino’s life as unattainable, but that would be a mistake. You don’t need to be one of the greatest fashion designers or own a château to live as he did. You need honesty, intention, and the courage to decide how you want a space to feel before you decide what goes into it. You need to know your signature, whatever it is, and use it with restraint and conviction.
Living Deliberately Is the Hardest Luxury
Valentino lived like an emperor, not because he owned palaces, but because he governed his surroundings as if he were. That’s a harder legacy than a color or a silhouette because it asks something of the rest of us and doesn’t give us much room to hide from accountability. It asks us to live deliberately and to treat our spaces, and by extension our lives, not as collections of different things, but as connected compositions and definitive statements about who we are, where we are, and what we're devoted to.
“Even as a young boy, my passion was to design, and I have been very lucky to be able to do what I have loved all my life. There can be few greater gifts than that.” - Valentino Garavani