Her eccentric and unmistakable tuft, her outfits are always impeccable, she has good taste to sell: she and Paola Marella , born in Milan in 1963, the most famous real estate agent in Italy. Every Wednesday evening she hosts the program of Real Time Shopping Night Home Edition with Max Viola. But you have other projects in the pipeline. Here’s what they are… You are considered a style icon. How did the idea of this particular look come about, especially as regards hair style
The idea goes back a long time ago, because I, I want to say, I had a life even before television and therefore I tried to keep my previous style and my personality, following my way of being. The idea of this hair style – a definitely winning idea – was born from my hairdresser about 15 years ago, when my dad passed away and in three months my hair had turned almost completely white . He was very innovative and suggested that I keep a little white around my face, so that it would soften it, because the color hardens a little. You are inspired by a particular style or choose the garments according to your personal taste.
I love to do my own thing. Furthermore, I am fortunate to have a very smart cousin who works in the fashion industryand has two beautiful shops in Turin. With her I have fun choosing the items and mixing them: from this comes what I have always been, which I like very much and which, fortunately, apparently also like others. But there are those who try to be too original risk falling into the opposite excess. How do you manage to maintain a balance
? Everyone has their own personality and must surely follow it. But we must never forget good taste, especially compatibly with age. There are unspoken rules: don’t overdo originality, never go over the top. For example, no to miniskirts and excessive necklines, both back and front, after a certain age. And maybe every now and then look in the mirror! What is the garment that is never missing in your wardrobe
. Definitely thelittle black dress , which cannot be ignored. With a beautiful and perfect decollete. But it is such a versatile garment that you can wear it in many variations: with a jacket, with a sweater, with color, all black, with black shoes, with a jewel jacket. And then you can reinvent it in many ways. I have had sheath dresses in the closet for 10 years and I constantly wear them. How do you organize the ideal walk-in closet?
I would very much like to have a walk-in closet, but unfortunately I don’t have one. I live with two men, husband and son, and I don’t have huge spaces, even if one might think the opposite. In a house there are many things about the son, between school and university, and about the husband and therefore the space is limited and it must be rationalized. However, if I had a walk-in closet, I would love to put the pants all on one side sorted by color, even if I don’t really like colored clothes except in bags and shoes. I would put the blues, the blacks, the beiges in gradation, because I am tidy in a maniacal way. I would order everything by gender and by colors: skirts, jackets, dresses, shoes… let’s not talk about shoes, I would put them all in the boxes with the photograph of the shoe on the box. I would go to a wedding to organize a walk-in closet, I could spend whole days there. When I was inspecting homes with wonderful walk-in wardrobes, I always thought: “If I ever had such a space available I would spend the whole day there”.What style advice can you give to our readers
The advantage of fashion today is that there are many items available, even very accessible, to be combined, but always with good taste. Of course, you have to have good taste … I have a great friend who, for me and like a sister, is a woman of extraordinary elegance: she mixes very beautiful things with garments and accessories from Zara, H&M, Oviesse … They are mixed with care , a style and a class that in my opinion make her one of the most elegant women I have ever met. You don’t have to spend too much either to dress with style or to furnish with style. In this regard, you who are an architect, what advice can you give to our readers to buy the right furniture and what cannot be missing in a home
We are very lucky: we live in a moment in which there are recovery fashions that make it possible, in fact, to recover objects from the past. We have had great designers in the past, such as Gio Ponti, who have created extraordinary pieces that can very well be adapted. Let’s think about how fashionable vintage is: the 50s, the 70s are back in a big way and then we can go to attics, cellars, attics where we can recover grandmother’s furniture. So on the one hand reassess everything we find. On the other hand, today we have a huge range of finishes and coatings, with which you can play at absolutely low costs. You can really do a lot with prices that were impossible in the past years. In the 1980s, if you didn’t have a professional and a lot of money, you couldn’t rebuild a house. And then there are many young people who produce very original pieces at low cost. There is no need to go and buy the architect’s design piece: of course, if you want the unique piece, that’s fine, but there are also young people who do interesting things that can be proposed in a somewhat particular furniture.The style in furnishing is similar to that in dressing
As in dressing the shoe and the bag are something that for us women can also be a little shock, so in the furnishing lights, paintings, fabrics, they can give that touch that makes particular a house. You just have to have the desire to search, to look around, perhaps even in magazines. Just as in fashion you look at the models of the great designers, so you do in furniture and you can do really interesting things with very low budgets. We will see it both in Shopping Night, where at the end of the episode we will give some tips on what, in our opinion, is the ideal furnishing of the episode, and in Changing Rooms, a new program that we are recording now and will start in early December, in which with a very low budget we will completely change a room.What is your ideal furniture
For me, furniture is a bit like clothes: something traditional and classic, but with contaminations. I don’t like a style that is all the same, unique. I prefer to combine design objects with a classic base: lights, which I love very much, real objects or particular paintings and frames, with which to dress the walls. And then the fabrics, of course, which can completely change the environment: old armchairs or old sofas with renewed fabrics immediately take on a new life.
