Porcelain is alchemy. So claimed Johann Friedrich Böttger in 1708 when, imprisoned by a king until he could turn lead into gold, he instead produced a recipe for the hard white moulding paste that had eluded Europeans for centuries. It was a DIY solution to the increasing scarcity of ‘white gold’, long imported from China on costly frigates. These days, discount porcelain dinnerware sails on container ships. It’s kitsch, but still bears traces of 18th-century grandeur in its lustrous glaze.
You might well consider Francesca DiMattio an alchemist for the way she’s transformed her family home in Manhattan. The artist, who has worked primarily in ceramics for more than a decade, has encrusted the town house’s interiors with intricate porcelain and painted tiles. At first glance, it’s the kind of baroque grandeur one might expect from Chelsea, a neighbourhood of starchitect-designed luxury condos and blue-chip art galleries; but up close, the details get fuzzy. Tile murals in the style of Dutch hunting paintings are hurriedly executed. A Rococo fireplace mantel comprises uneven bowls and finger pots that have broken in the kiln. Ceramic chairs are suspiciously light to the touch. A Giorgio Morandi painting is just a little too green.
That’s because DiMattio executed every detail by hand – including the furniture, chandeliers and the art on the walls – with help from her husband, the painter Garth Weiser. Call it ‘broke Baroque’, or a palazzo on a budget. Warm and inviting, it feels more like a floral fantasyland for DiMattio and Weiser’s young children – Bruno, age six, and Petra, age two – than the austere estates where European aristocrats are weaned.
Chelsea wasn’t so tony, either, when her parents bought the place in the 1970s. It was a working-class district not far from the industrial piers along the Hudson river, dotted with hustler bars and all-night diners. Her father, Joseph, a research scientist from Puglia, Italy, and her mother, Tamara, a ceramicist born in a displaced persons camp in Germany, sunk all their savings into the crumbling town house, recently gutted by a fire. Joseph replaced the floors, doors and windows himself, and dug a bathtub from the dense earth of their basement, which Tamara covered with salvaged mosaic tiles. DiMattio grew up in that basement apartment, and for most of her life the upper two floors of the building were split into additional units that the family rented for passive income.
Francesca met Garth in 2001 while studying painting at Cooper Union, and the two moved to a small apartment on the second storey, sleeping in a lofted bed there for six years. They acted as supers for the building, doing repairs in exchange for rent, though there wasn’t much they could do about the leaky roof or buckling floorboards. Joseph and Tamara, meanwhile, had bought a house in upstate New York, which they installed with modern plywood walls and concrete detailing. Francesca knew that if she were to ever renovate the Chelsea house, she would do it differently.
On one trip upstate, Francesca began experimenting with her mother’s kiln. Fascinated by material history, she wanted to combine cut vase forms from different cultures into open, unstable vessels. Finding it too complicated, she apprenticed with her father-in-law, the ceramicist Kurt Weiser, making regular trips to experiment in his Arizona studio. The resulting sculptures, first exhibited at Salon 94 in 2012 and for which she has since become best known, are gloriously kitsch concatenations of classical ceramics and mass-market commodities. A few of them rest in the wall niches scattered across the Chelsea apartment: Teva sandals that appear to have crash-landed on to Meissen vases.
When Bruno was born, DiMattio had to rethink her sense of speed and scale. ‘When you’re pregnant, you can’t lift heavy clay, you can’t use poisonous paints, you can’t make big sculptures,’ she says. She began making smaller cups, plates and bowls, some of which Bruno would later paint. This shift turned out to be a bless- ing in disguise when the renovations began in late 2019. With Petra slung across her chest, painting tiles and moulding wall sconces were some of the few sculptural activities safe for DiMattio. ‘So much of this project came to be because of the con- straints of having kids. It was about some- thing small that you could stop and start.’ As it took over the whole apartment, that small something became very big indeed.
A friend from junior high drew up the architectural plans, but otherwise no drawings were done in preparation for the project, including for the larger paintings. The 18th-century Portuguese, Dutch and Mexican motifs in the kitchen were all done on cheap bisque tiles, which needed reglazing because their whites were so uneven. ‘There are no shifts in material – it’s treated in an almost Modernist way. This prevents it from being too much,’ DiMattio explains, noting that she ignored her mother’s advice not to tile the refrigerator. Behind the stove, a mural of hang- ing animal carcasses was inspired by New York’s Greek restaurants. Weiser painted a set of tiles for the powder room with graffiti tags, while Bruno decorated his own with inky abstractions.
‘I’m fascinated by how the technique of blue and white on porcelain has moved through multiple cultures and time peri- ods,’ DiMattio tells me. ‘I’ve done sculptures that move from Iznik to Japanese Edo period to Ming dynasty to Delft, blurring differences through formal connections.’ She adds, ‘I love anything that points to the instability of value and taste.’ It’s an aesthetic that recalls the crockery of queens as readily as soap dishes you can buy from Walmart. ‘When this kind of material was inaccessible to different cultures in its early history, they would make their own version,’ DiMattio says. She sculpted the dining table from porcelain, and it stands on four stiletto-heel boot legs – a true feat of feminine engineering. The chairs and sofas, meanwhile, were made from plywood covered with paper clay and sprayed with a clear coat of auto-body resin, so they look ceramic but are emphatically child-friendly. Even the floral upholstery and drapes were hand-painted. ‘Most of the furniture we owned before was inherited or found on the street,’ reveals DiMattio, reclining on her new, DIY Louis XIV loveseat.
‘My work has always been inspired by domesticity and finding ways to represent it that don’t feel sweet or beautiful, so it was interesting to actually work in a domestic frame,’ she says. The result is as sweet as can be, but precisely for all its imperfections. Renovations continue apace, including on a small third-floor studio for DiMattio. In the meantime, she’s working on a show for Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London that will open in autumn 2023: ‘I’m picturing the whole exhibition as a space I’d like to live in.
‘Something about repetition makes these really familiar feminine motifs, like flowers, no longer feel so sweet and lovely. And in that too-much-ness, it becomes powerful, loud, disconcerting – like a disease, a virus. Its behaviour is rogue,’ she reflects. ‘I’m always trying to figure out ways to see these feminine elements differently. How do you take something that has such a bad rap and make it have content? That’s something I always think about when making work. I guess this just became a world of it.
A version of this article appeared in the October 2022 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
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