This Side Up

Cindy Allen -- Interior Design, 6/1/2005 12:00:00 AM

When confronted with an old-master drawing and entrusted with establishing its authenticity, the art-history scholar can pull a time-honored trick out of her bag: She simply turns the sheet upside down. Elementary as it might sound, she does this to ensure that the composition's elements make sense singularly while working flawlessly within the whole.

This month's cover story does exactly that—in large-as-life scale to boot. Tettero and SZI Design, the team behind the new Viktor & Rolf boutique in Milan, turned expectations on their heads by manufacturing a true antigravity experience with herringbone oak parquet above and gilt chandeliers sprouting from the pure white plane underfoot. We gladly accepted the role of fly on the wall—its topsy-turvy paneling offering us the ideal vantage point in a space where creativity matched need, personal poetry crowned problem-solving, and humor, not market cost, had the last laugh. Even eccentricity stopped being a four-letter word and resumed its proper role as a cherished Anglo-Saxon tradition.

Turn the page from Viktor & Rolf and—to be sure—the rest of our feature stories are right-side up. But take our word for it: Before including them in our June portfolio, we examined them first the art-history way, and every single one measured up. Or down.

Trying to keep my head on straight...