When you can’t see them in person, architectural masterpieces are only as great as the photos that capture them. A new book titled Interior Voyages offers a sumptuous tour of the world’s most beautiful houses, courtesy of Matthieu Salvaing. The French photographer’s interiors have the distinct feel of Luca Guadagnino’s “desire trilogy” to them, not least because one of the homes included in the collection is the very one featured in Guadagnino’s film I Am Love—Milan’s Villa Necchi Campiglio, designed by Piero Portaluppi in 1935 for Gigina Necchi and her husband, Angelo Campiglio. The property is graced with paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, Filippo de Pisis, and other Italian artists.
Among the more than two dozen other spaces in the volume are Balthus’s storybook Swiss chalet, built in the 1750s; artist Carlos Páez Vilaró’s all-white, Gaudí-esque Casapueblo, in Punta Ballena, Uruguay; an 1860s Scottish Highlands estate with a tree running through its many floors; the Caracas villa that Italian architect Gio Ponti built for Venezuelan collectors Armando and Anala Planchart; Ivory Coast’s Hôtel Ivoire, a masterpiece built following the country’s independence; São Paulo’s Casa de Vidrio, designed and furnished by Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi; Mexican architect Luis Barragán’s personal Mexico City residence; and Casa Frank Sinatra, the Acapulco house owned by Sinatra during his fleeting love affair with Mia Farrow.
“There are two types of photographers,” writes the French journalist Paul-Henry Bizon in the preface to Interior Voyages. “There are those who present themselves in terms of their ‘profession,’ who talk about technique, framing and light, about careers and competitors. And then there are those who talk about anything and everything but photography, about painting and color, magnificent houses and the people who live in them.” Luckily for us, Salvaing belongs to the latter category. —Julia Vitale