It’s a cold February morning and Rolf Sachs has just welcomed some friends into his Roman studio. He is wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, lemon-yellow-framed glasses and a beaming smile. The Swiss artist, who is 67 but has the energy of a teenager, has not long returned from a full check-up at the city’s best-known hospital and announces that, according to his doctor, ‘Rome is the healthiest of cities’. Really? The news is met with sceptical frowns. ‘Contrary to common opinion,’ he declares in suave English with barely a trace of a Swiss-German accent, ‘the air here is exceptionally clean.’ Sachs, whose conceptual inclinations and surreal sense of humour have inspired his monumental output of artefacts, has particular reason to delight at the doctor’s optimistic fantasy. It proves that his decision four years ago to leave London, where he had been based since 1994, and move to the Eternal City was as healthy as it had been impulsive. ‘I came here for love,’ he says. ‘It’s as simple as that.’ The object of that love is Princess Mafalda von Hessen, the simpaticissima German/Italian beauty, who is based in Rome. A mother of four and a direct descendant of the Italian royal family, Mafalda has made a name for herself painting luminous portraits of people in their interiors. This new Roman (and romantic) chapter – ‘the happiest of my life’, Sachs confesses – coincides with his own renaissance as an artist.
Nowhere is his ebullient pursuit of joy and self-expression more tangible than in his studio, set in what was a car park on the ground floor of a late 19th-century apartment block. Stepping into it is like being sucked into a multi-sensory Wunderkammer filled with objects stripped of their original function and morphed into something very different. In the large entrance hall, for instance, dozens of metal buckets – of the sort traditionally used in rural settings to milk cows or feed chickens – are dangling from a web of red electrical cords hanging from the ceiling. Before he turned them into lamps, Sachs dipped some of them in fresh paint and then pressed them on the white walls, leaving a haphazard pattern of multicoloured circles.
Rolf Sachs was two years old when his French mother, Anne-Marie Faure, died from a botched minor operation. His father, Gunther Sachs, the photographer, author and scion of the Opel car dynasty (he famously went on to marry, and di- vorce, Brigitte Bardot), was unable to tend to his son daily. Rolf spent part of his childhood with his German grandmother in the Alps (‘she gave me strong roots’) before being sent off to a Swiss boarding school at the age of eight. Might that childhood explain his eagerness to create a playful world for himself now? He doesn’t think so. ‘When my mother was pregnant with me, she was a thriving young woman. Her happiness has seeped into me,’ he says. Even boarding school, where he started to experiment with paint and photography, turned out to be a joyous experience. In the mid-1980s Sachs left a burgeoning business career for a creative one and eventually moved to London, where he founded his own design studio. Ballet and opera sets, interiors, furniture design, installations of his own surreal artefacts, neon sculptures and, more recently, paintings: nothing is out of his range, so long as it satisfies his absurdist sensibility. Which is why decamping to Rome meant finding a suitably large and versatile studio for his varied artistic appetite.
When Sachs first saw this space in 2019, it was dark, damp and in a ruinous condition. That didn’t worry him, though, because he could count on the vision of a dream team of architects: Elica Sartogo and her mother Nathalie Grenon, who, with husband Piero Sartogo, runs a highly respected Rome-based practice. The next two years were spent tearing down the place and redesigning every detail from scratch. Thanks to the architects’ know-how, traditional Roman elements have seeped into this otherwise minimalist shell. The grimy, patched-up cement floor was replaced with a warm, red-toned cocciopesto made with lime, crushed bricks and sand – the likes of which were used by the ancient Romans – while the walls were covered with the thick lime paste often found in palazzos. Tiny hopper windows near the ceilings were torn down to make space for tall, elegant openings that look on to an inner courtyard, now planted with Zoysia ja- ponica grass and potted lemon trees.
The tour continues past the dining area and into the main studio. The initial impression here is of utter and jolly chaos. Hanging from coloured cables running along the length of the ceiling is an array of seemingly unrelated objects: an empty birdcage, a series of uncomfortable-looking chairs, several open umbrellas (a tongue-in-cheek joke aimed at superstitious Romans, no doubt), a life- size human skeleton, a small plane, a Chinese lamp and a disco ball.
As the gaze lowers, however, one realises that there is method in the madness. This open space is punctuated by tables like islands in an archipelago. The paper, brushes and perfectly sharpened pencils indicate where he paints. ‘Rome has inspired me to devote more and more time to painting,’ he says, pointing to his new series of poetically charged artworks – froissages, as he calls them – made with huge sheets of crumpled paper and pigments. Along the whole length of the window-lit far wall, Sartogo devised a complex system of black-and-white folding walls upon which Sachs’s monumental prints and paintings are hung. When opened, these create a series of small rooms within the vast space. At the far end of this room, separated by another wall, are a dark room and a photography studio. There is a hushed and busy atmosphere about the place, not unlike that of a Renaissance master’s workspace, accentuated by the presence of half a dozen young assistants, many of them artists.
A visit to this studio usually culminates with a celebratory lunch around a huge ‘Ausfahrt’ sign that has somehow found its way from the side of a motorway in Germany and discovered itself transformed into a dining table. Delicious food is brought in from the adjacent kitchen, which is lit up by two enormous colanders from the Italian army, now in their later life turned into lamps. Mafalda often joins these luncheons, which invariably end with a basket of Swiss chocolates being passed around. Sachs is, after all, a bon viveur. ‘One could say that my ethos in life has always been to laugh, dance and be merry,’ he concludes. ‘Rome, spending my days in this studio and with Mafalda have added a whole new dimension to that: I feel free here, I am in sync with my soul’.
For information about Rolf Sachs’s work, visit rolfsachs.com or Instagram @rolfsachsstudio
A version of this article appears in the May 2023 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
