Interior Designer Ken Fulk Brings an Austrian Estate’s Salon Room Back to Life
The hills are alive, and now, so is the Hotel Schloss Leopoldskron‘s Crimson Salon Room.
Ken Fulk, in partnership with Trevor D. Traina, the previous U.S. Ambassador to Austria, has revived a single of the estate’s most significant rooms in honor of Max Reinhardt, 1 of the founders of Austria’s Salzburg Festival.
When The Sound of New music aired in 1965, it was unbeknownst to the Von Trapp family (on which the musical is based mostly) that the creation would soon develop into a throughout the world phenomenon. Set in Salzburg, Austria, and starring Julie Andrews, it retells the story of Maria Von Trapp, who will take a occupation as governess to the household though selecting irrespective of whether or not she ought to turn out to be a nun. She enchants viewers with her soprano voice, from the rolling eco-friendly hills of Salzburg to the decadent rooms of the Schloss Leopoldskron. This manufacturing was, finally, a continuation of Reinhardt’s lengthy-long lasting musical affect on Austrian society.
The residence was originally commissioned as a spouse and children estate in 1736 by the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, but Max Reinhardt, Europe’s most famous theater director and resident of the home from 1918 to 1938, turned it into the nucleus of culture in the course of his time. While there, Reinhardt designed 4 elaborate spaces such as the Venetian Place, a baroque two-tale library, the Chinese place, and the Crimson Salon home. The Pink Salon is where Reinhardt auspiciously started the Salzburg Songs Festival in 1918, a festival of arts and audio that especially championed the will work of Wolfgang Mozart.
In the Crimson Salon home, the estate’s existing cane dining chairs reupholstered in materials from historic textile properties Rubelli and Pierre Frey.
“They imagine of this area as the birthplace of a person of the most critical music festivals in the environment. It arrived about right after Environment War I, when persons necessary music to soothe their souls, and understood that there was a have to have to bring the environment jointly,” Fulk says. “It was a shared higher language.”
Through Nazi occupation in World War II, all but one particular room in the palace was still left unscathed: the Red Salon Space. Tragically, Reinhardt fled to The us throughout the war and died penniless. In a letter to his wife, he wrote: “I have lived in Leopoldskron for eighteen many years, genuinely lived, and I have introduced it to lifestyle. I have lived in each and every place, every single desk, every chair, each and every gentle, and just about every picture. I have developed, built, embellished, and planted and I have dreamt of it when I was not there. I have often cherished it in a festive way, not as a little something ordinary. These ended up my most gorgeous, prolific, and mature years … I have lost it without lamenting. I have misplaced everything that I carried into it. It was the harvest of my life’s do the job.”
Much more than a fifty percent-century later on, Fulk, Traina, and wallpaper and fabric firm, De Gournay, have labored to revive the legend of this room just in time for what would’ve been Reinhardt’s 150th birthday. Right after a two-yr method, the Red Salon place when once again beams with Reinhardt’s theatrical spirit. Like a testament of faith, one of Reinhardt’s real theatre curtains was observed in the attic of the estate just as the redesign process started.
London-dependent De Gournay, known for its hand-painted wallpapers and mastery of antique paper restoration, to aid translate Fulk’s vision to all four partitions applying motifs borrowed from Reinhardt’s historic canvas.
The record of the estate beats on by the use of an elongated picket Louis XVI-Style cherry table by Salda1870, which is anchored by an Iranian Kirman rug ordered by Traina from the esteemed Dorotheum Auction House. The desk is accompanied by a established of the estate’s existing cane dining chairs reupholstered in purple materials from historic textile houses Rubelli and Pierre Frey. The dash of pink plays onto the title, without the need of it currently being as well literal.
The principal ingredient, nevertheless, need to be awarded to the Klimt-like wallpaper that wraps all over the home. The De Gournay wallpaper illustrates an out of doors, tropical location with lush palms and traveling avians. At first, it seems to be a stark distinction from the rest of the decor or even the estate as a entire. But, by some means, it feels correct. The drama of the wallpaper is a real testomony to the fantastical aura that Reinhardt imbued into the estate whilst he lived there.
“I believe Max, just like me, has illusions of grandeur,” Fulk suggests. ” He made use of this area to entertain and to manifest his tips and skills. Of course, do I appreciate a excellent occasion and cozying up with anyone and gossiping on the couch? Of course. But, this is also a home that has confirmed can improve the class of our life. It appears extraordinary, but the Austrians and Americans deeply connected to this estate see it that way.”
These days, the place will be applied to residence conferences for the Salzburg World Seminar, an unbiased non-income corporation with “a mission to problem existing and long run leaders to shape the environment.” In truth, according to Fulk, the home felt finish only “30 seconds ahead of [they] showed it to the viewing dignitaries.”
While the room feels comprehensive now, who’s to say what it will look like in the next handful of years, or the subsequent century? ” I believe of these matters as living and respiration. It will frequently be in flux as a salon,” Fulk says.
To pay a visit to or ebook your remain at the Lodge Schloss Leopoldskron, remember to go to schloss-leopoldskron.com.
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