Shonan Purie Trehan can’t quite explain how she and her family ended up settling in Florence. It was some sort of instinct that brought her to this Renaissance villa at the top of a tree-lined road that leads to the city’s Piazzale Michelangelo, says the Indian architect, interior designer and founder of LAB Studio.
Pre-kids, she and her husband had lived in Montreal, Amsterdam, London and Singapore, but as a family they had always resided in Mumbai, in a hillside house outside the centre. It was where they spent the pandemic. ‘The isolation, contrary to what one might think, was actually a gift,’ Shonan recalls.
‘Afterwards, the children began to fondly remember their time in the hills. The idea of moving back to a greener way of life was born from this. We said to ourselves: maybe there’s a way to find something different that would be a life experience for us and the children.’
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They originally planned to rent in Florence, but a close friend, Caroline Budini Gattai, showed them this villa, and ‘how could we not fall in love?’ asks Shonan. She returns to Mumbai once a month, relishing the intensity of her professional work and how it’s balanced by the beauty of her new life in Italy.
She may have found a location she loved, but Shonan needed a local colleague to steer the project. Her husband came across Luigi Fragola’s private home in a magazine. The Italian architect is known for his magnificent energy-efficient private homes, as well as his work on luxury hotels, including The Place Firenze, the Belmond Villa San Michele in Fiesole and the Ameron in Frankfurt.
‘We contacted him and the meeting was one of the happiest imaginable,’ she recalls. Luigi is just as enthusiastic: ‘Finding clients who have a vision was delightful,’ he says. ‘Working alongside an architect like Shonan, with a culture so different from mine, was incredibly inspiring.’
Both Shonan and Luigi are fans of Italian design, so the villa is filled with Stilnovo lights and furniture by Cassina, Edra, Baxter and Meridiani, with these iconic pieces sitting alongside antiques and custom-made pieces from India. Renaissance villas, while beautiful on the outside, can often lack a contemporary cheerfulness inside. ‘They can be serious, overly formal,’ Luigi muses. ‘Here, however, thanks to the vital energy of this family and the interior elements, we managed to bring a touch of freshness and joy.’
Part of that is thanks to the colour scheme. The shades, says Shonan, ‘had to be Tuscan, paying homage to the land, but also fresh, lively and tasteful’. Her favourite space is the office on the top floor. ‘You reach it by stairs, which I wanted to be peach pink – a shade I adore,’ she says. ‘It’s my “room of my own”, as Virginia Woolf would say. Often, I hear the quick footsteps of the kids coming up to ask me literally anything! But I love those little footsteps…’
Surprised and touched by the community they are now part of, Shonan admits that she thought their life here would be ‘more isolated, maybe lonelier’. ‘Instead, in no time, we’ve met so many people from all over the world who choose to live in Florence.’ The family is also continually hosting. ‘Everyone wants to visit,’ she says, smiling. ‘This house, unexpectedly, keeps us connected to our loved ones.’ luigifragola.com; labwerk.in
