February 18, 2024Michael Del Piero has a remarkable ability to compose rooms that people just want to be in. Rooted in neutral hues and satisfying textures, the spaces she designs feel deeply soothing, bringing together elements collected from different decades and countries to deliver profound character everywhere you look.
Surprisingly, Del Piero, who has offices in Chicago and the Hamptons, has flown below the radar of mainstream shelter publications while remaining a closely watched figure among design-savvy insiders.
Inspired by both American and European design, and incorporating everything from Georgian wing chairs to modern Nerone and Patuzzi wall panels, her work is aligned with celebrated Belgian masters like Axel Vervoort and Vincent Van Duysen, though always with a twist that’s all her own.
Perhaps that’s why it was a Belgian publisher, Beta-Plus, that was the first to approach her about writing a book. It’s definitely why I jumped at the chance to partner with her on that book, Michael Del Piero: Traveled and Textural, even though I was unfamiliar with her work.
Browsing through her portfolio, I was struck by the range and beauty of the homes she had designed and surprised I hadn’t seen them before. I wanted to know more.
When I met Del Piero, I quickly realized that she was a creative spirit who followed an atypical path to design. Before finding her way there, she worked as a nurse, then an executive coach. She stumbled into interiors by shopping for art and antiques — first locally, for her own Chicago home, chancing upon a painting by Mose Tolliver, and then in multiweek buying sprees across Europe, picking up treasures that she brought home in containers to offer in one-off sales.
For each sale, she found an empty house and then furnished it from top to bottom to show the pieces in a complete residential environment. She mixed 19th-century French chairs with a dining table by Angelo Mangiarotti and created an installation comprising 80 wooden candlesticks produced in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United States. Each time, every piece found a buyer.
Beyond the objects, however, shoppers had no trouble seeing what else was at play: Del Piero’s natural ability to conceive relaxed, inviting interiors. One of those shoppers asked her to decorate her home, and an interior design career was born. (Del Piero still has a store in Wainscott, New York, and sells her collected pieces on her 1stDibs storefront.)
She approaches interiors in much the way she approached those sales. “I would say I have an object-driven design style,” she explains. “For some reason, I cannot separate a beautiful object from where I think it should be placed. Even if it’s not for one of my projects, I just visualize the endgame.”
Del Piero never attended design school. She has always been driven by gut, intuition and her personal experiences. She adores the Hamptons, the south of France, the Netherlands and Belgium, and her experiences in those places loom large.
“I just love a relaxed style,” she says. “I was heavily influenced by design in the Hamptons and my travels in Europe. It’s that linen-based, drapey, wrinkly kind of aesthetic that appealed to me.”
She frequently piles feel-good textures into her interiors via elements like hand-chiseled African benches, rugs woven from natural grasses and anything in rough-hewn stone. In her own Chicago apartment, a literal tumbleweed is mounted on the wall as art.
“I don’t use color very often, so you need some level of interest, which the texture brings forth,” she explains. “Heavily textured items and things with patina add soul.”
Her interiors might best be described as richly edited rather than purely minimalist. She has no interest in paring things down to the bone, but she also doesn’t embrace the layers-upon-layers approach to design.
Instead, she aims to find equilibrium while adding just enough to make a space interesting. “Designing a room is about composition, like a painting, where if you add or remove any one thing, it changes the balance,” she says.
A home she designed in Palm Beach is a good example. Graphically bold, with hits of potent black, dark-stained wood and tan leather within a white architectural wrapper, its look is delightfully distinct in a city where most people expect to see vivacious color and pattern.
The furniture is a mix of pieces from different times and places. In the kitchen, a traditional armchair with turned wooden legs and nailhead trim is installed near a massive, clean-lined quartzite island; a bathroom with a monolithic stone vanity is illuminated by an antique iron chandelier; a weathered Swedish milking stool from about 1800 is contrasted with a custom tailored bed in the primary bedroom.
Even the interior architecture is hard to pin down in terms of style, as Del Piero combined details like a contemporary sculptural staircase with neoclassical moldings and paneled walls.
In the book, I write that Del Piero represents “a confident new voice in American design.” After getting to know her, I believe her confidence grows out of her genuine love for, and curiosity about, design by different people, from different places and eras.
As she put it: “I’ve always believed in taking a stand and not concerning myself with trends.”
Following an exploratory path to interior design, and being open to objects and influences she finds along the way, have brought personal rewards. “I love waking up every day,” she said, “and doing what I do.”
“This is an object lesson in simplicity as the ultimate sophistication. This barstool is simply chic — not fussy, not overdone and yet quite fantastic.”